Commentary: Ukraine drone attack was ingenious – and a nightmare scenario come true

CNA

05-06-2025

SINGAPORE: Ukraine has held out against a stronger adversary for more than three years, thanks to its ability to wage asymmetric warfare. Even so, the drone attack deep inside Russia on Sunday (Jun 1) was particularly audacious.
Multiple drone swarms launched from container trucks hit four airbases thousands of kilometres from the frontlines and destroyed several Russian long-range bombers. For some, it was a "genius" move; for others, it confirms a nightmare scenario.
Ukraine's Operation Spider's Web is a classic example of how technology has rewritten the playbook of war, and how long-range strikes into enemy territory can be conducted cheaply and quietly with disproportionate results.
Beyond Russia, the attack would have sent reverberations among defence planners around the world.
For some time now, even though some analysts have warned that something like this was not beyond the realm of possibility given the technology already available, it would have undoubtedly been a shock to see it put into practice so successfully and on such a scale. Everyone and their valuable military assets can be vulnerable to such threats.
WHAT WENT DOWN IN OPERATION SPIDER'S WEB
Hundreds of drones, each carrying an explosive munition, struck bases deep inside Russia – with the farthest one, Belaya, located in Siberia, just north of Russia's border with Mongolia and more than 4,000km from the Ukraine.
These bases were likely chosen due to their housing of long-range, high-value Russian air assets such as bombers and surveillance aircraft. The former have been lobbing cruise missiles at Ukraine with impunity since the start of the Russian invasion in February 2022.
Ukraine's intelligence service revealed the drones were smuggled into Russia on specially designed racks housed inside modified standard shipping containers. They were driven to spots near the air bases by unwitting Russian truck drivers.
The Ukrainians added that the drones were mostly flown autonomously, with video feeds and some operator input sent via the Russian mobile phone network. One of their videos appears to suggest this was the case, with the drone hovering above the wing of a Russian Tu-95MS bomber and gingerly adjusting its position before plunging down near where the plane's wing met its fuselage.
This is one of its most vulnerable spots – the location of its fuel tanks. Another video released by Ukraine that has been geolocated by open-source intelligence (OSINT) investigators to Olenya air base in northern Russia showed three more Tu-95MS bombers and a transport aircraft burning fiercely.
UNCONVENTIONAL MEANS, DEVASTATING RESULTS
The attack is the latest demonstration of Ukraine's ingenuity and ability to harness technology and use unconventional methods to exploit a stronger adversary's vulnerabilities.
The Ukrainians claimed to have hit 41 Russian aircraft, though a United States assessment put the number closer to 20, of which about 10 were destroyed. Given that Russia's long-range bomber fleet has been estimated to be about 80 aircraft, the loss of almost 13 per cent of the force represents a significant blow to this area of Russian military capabilities.
This was not the first time Ukraine has used drones to strike Russian bases far from the frontlines.
Previous occasions have utilised larger, longer-ranged drones launched from Ukraine. But these attacks have lower rates of successes against defended targets as the drones are bigger and more easily detected and targeted by air defences.
Still, these have had some success, particularly with attacks on Russian ammunition storages that have triggered spectacular explosions and fires and deprived their enemy of bombs and other explosives.
They have also forced the Russians to base their aircraft further from Ukraine, which imposes a cost: increased transit times to and from operating areas, increased strain on aircraft and crews, which reduced the number of missions that can be flown.
HEADACHE TO DEFEND AGAINST
So what are the options for militaries seeking to protect valuable assets if conventional air defences would struggle to detect and destroy such drones?
There are a range of anti-drone systems (or Counter Unmanned Aircraft Systems, C-UAS) available, ranging from guns and missiles to electronic jammers that disrupt the signals between the drone and its operator. Other solutions are also being developed, such as the use of laser (directed energy) weapons to destroy the drone.
Each has its downsides, however.
Missiles are an expensive way to down drones that can be cheaper by orders of magnitude, while they, like guns, are limited by the amount of ammunition each system can be carried.
Directed energy weapons have high power requirements which means they tend to have a large physical footprint. Japan has built and tested a 10-kilowatt directed energy C-UAS system that is mounted on a large eight-wheeled truck.
Thus, a sufficiently large drone swarm has the potential to overwhelm missile-, gun- and energy-based C-UAS systems with their sheer numbers. Another issue is scaling, particularly in large countries like Russia, where literally thousands of systems need to be acquired to adequately protect every likely target.
If the swarm uses the local mobile phone network to operate, as the Ukrainians are claiming, then jammers would be of limited utility as they operate on other frequencies. Both sides in the war have also been increasing the use of fibre-optic drones in the battlefields of eastern Ukraine, where operators control their drones via a fibre-optic cable attached to the drone that can stretch for tens of kilometres, meaning they cannot be jammed by electronic means.
The other possible solution against the threat is what is termed passive defences. These include the building of hardened shelters that provide all-round protection for high-value assets that are at the very least capable of protection against smaller munitions explosive devices.
It will take a lot of effort and will not come cheap, but the flipside is, what is the cost of leaving high value military assets like aircraft vulnerable to a threat that is no longer just hypothetical? It is a question that all countries will be quickly trying to answer now.