The Western media is convinced that a few trucks full of drones have decimated Russia’s fleet of strategic bombers:
Ukraine has launched one of its most audacious attacks of the war using a ‘swarm’ of kamikaze drones unleashed from the backs of trucks to devastate two of Russia’s most major airfields.
Dubbed ‘Operation Spiderweb’, the co-ordinated strikes have left Vladimir Putin humiliated and his prized warplanes in smouldering ruins.
Two remote military airfields, Olenya in the Arctic Murmansk region and Belaya in eastern Siberia, were rocked by massive explosions overnight, with dramatic footage showing fires raging for hours.
The bases, located thousands of miles from Ukraine, are key to Russia’s nuclear strike capability and were considered untouchable.
Yet Ukraine appears to have struck them with deadly precision, using first-person-view (FPV) drones launched from unmarked vans parked near the airfields.
Both are thousands of miles from Ukraine but were ‘under drone attack’, with dozens of Moscow’s nuclear capable warplanes evidently destroyed.
The Ukrainian media claimed more than 40 Putin aircraft had been hit, including Tu-95, Tu-22M3, and A-50 strategic bombers. The damage to the enemy was alleged to exceed £1.5billion.
If Kiev, Berlin, and London aren’t hit with major missile strikes in the next 24 hours, I think it will be safe to conclude that the damage reports are significantly exaggerated. Which I assume to be the case, in light of the number of Russian planes shot down by “the Ghost of Kiev”, the number of times Russia has run out of ammunition, and the number of times Vladimir Putin has died of cancer.
But it is interesting to observe how Ukraine is now reduced to celebrating acts of subterfuge and terrorism that may or may not even be real as the Russian military continues to advance at an increasing pace.
I’m mostly posting this here for the purposes of future comparison when the numbers are inevitably revised downward. However, it does show that Russia’s attempt at strategic deterrence through doctrine is not working.
UPDATE: It appears eight planes were confirmed damaged or destroyed.
5 Tu-95MS bombers, 2 Tu-22M3 bombers, 1 An-12 military transport aircraft.
Which is two more than Russia has lost in all of 2025, bringing the total to 14. To put this into perspective, in 2022, Russia lost 104 planes.