Archive June 2, 2025

Kyiv, Ukraine – Any description of Ukraine’s attacks on Russia’s fleet of strategic bombers could leave one scrambling for superlatives.

Forty-one planes – including supersonic Tu-22M long-range bombers, Tu-95 flying fortresses and A-50 early warning warplanes – were hit and damaged on Sunday on four airfields, including ones in the Arctic and Siberia, Ukrainian authorities and intelligence said.

Moscow did not comment on the damage to the planes but confirmed that the airfields were hit by “Ukrainian terrorist attacks”.

Videos posted by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), which planned and carried out the operation, which was called The Spiderweb, showed only a handful of planes being hit.

The strategic bombers have been used to launch ballistic and cruise missiles from Russian airspace to hit targets across Ukraine, causing wide scale damage and casualties.

The bomber fleet is one-third of Moscow’s “nuclear triad”, which also consists of nuclear missiles and missile-carrying warships.

According to some observers, the attack shattered Russia’s image of a nuclear superpower with a global reach.

The attack inadvertently “helped the West because it targeted [Russia’s] nuclear potential”, Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy head of the Ukrainian military’s general staff, told Al Jazeera.

While the assault decreases Russia’s potential to launch missiles on Ukraine, it will not affect the grinding ground hostilities along the crescent-shaped, 1,200km (745-mile) front line, he said.

Romanenko compared The Spiderweb’s scope and inventiveness to a string of 2023 Ukrainian attacks against Russia’s Black Sea fleet that was mostly concentrated in annexed Crimea.

Although Ukraine’s navy consisted of a handful of small, decades-old warships that fit into a football field-sized harbour, Kyiv reinvented naval warfare by hitting and drowning Russian warships and submarines with missiles and air and sea drones.

Moscow hastily relocated the decimated Black Sea fleet eastwards to the port of Novorossiysk and no longer uses it to intercept Ukrainian civilian vessels loaded with grain and steel.

The Spiderweb caught Russia’s military strategists off-guard because they had designed air defences to thwart attacks by missiles or heavier, long-range strike drones.

Instead, the SBU used 117 toy-like first-person-view (FPV) drones, each costing just hundreds of dollars, that were hidden in wooden crates loaded onto trucks, it said.

Their unsuspecting drivers took them right next to the airfields – and were shocked to see them fly out and cause the damage that amounted to $7bn, the SBU said.

“The driver is running around in panic,” said a Russian man who filmed thick black smoke rising from the Olenegorsk airbase in Russia’s Arctic region of Murmansk, which borders Norway.

Other videos released by the SBU were filmed by drones as they were hitting the planes, causing thundering explosions and sky-high plumes of black smoke.

Russia’s air defence systems guarding the airfields were not designed to detect and hit the tiny FPV drones while radio jamming equipment that could have caused them to stray off course wasn’t on or malfunctioned.

The SBU added a humiliating detail – The Spiderweb’s command centre was located in an undisclosed location in Russia near an office of the Federal Security Service (FSB), Moscow’s main intelligence agency, which Russian President Vladimir Putin once headed.

“This is a slap on the face for Russia, for FSB, for Putin,” Romanenko said.

However, Kyiv didn’t specifically target the pillar of Russia’s nuclear triad.

“They are destroying Russian strategic aviation not because it’s capable of carrying missiles with nuclear warheads but because of its use to launch … nonnuclear [missiles],” Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s Bremen University, told Al Jazeera.

The operation, which took 18 months to plan and execute, damaged a third of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.

“This is our most far-reaching operation. Ukraine’s actions will definitely be in history textbooks,” he wrote on Telegram late on Sunday. “We’re doing everything to make Russia feel the necessity to end this war.”

The SBU used artificial intelligence algorithms to train the drones to recognise Soviet-era aircraft by using the planes displayed at an aviation museum in central Ukraine, the Clash Report military blogger said on Monday.

‘The very logic of the negotiations process won’t change’

The attack took place a day before Ukrainian and Russian diplomats convened in Istanbul to resume long-stalled peace talks.

But it will not affect the “logic” of the negotiations, a Kyiv-based political analyst said.

“Emotionally, psychologically and politically, the operation strengthens the positions of Ukrainian negotiators,” Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Penta think tank, told Al Jazeera. “But the very logic of the negotiations process won’t change.”

“Both sides will consider [US President] Donald Trump an arbiter, and whoever is first to leave the talks loses, ruins its negotiation positions with the United States,” Fesenko said.

Once again, the talks will likely show that the sides are not ready to settle as Russia is hoping to carve out more Ukrainian territory for itself and Ukraine is not going to throw in the towel.

“Russia wants to finish off Ukraine, and we’re showing that we will resist, we won’t give up, won’t capitulate,” Fesenko said.

By Monday, analysts using satellite imagery confirmed that 13 planes – eight Tu-95s, four Tu-22Ms and one An-12 – have been destroyed or damaged.

“What a remarkable success in a well-executed operation,” Chris Biggers, a military analyst based in Washington, DC, wrote on X next to a map showing the destruction of eight planes at the Belaya airbase in the Irkutsk region in southeastern Siberia.

Five more planes have been destroyed at the Murmansk base, according to Oko Hora, a group of Ukrainian analysts.

The Spiderweb targeted three more airfields, two in western regions and one near Russia’s Pacific coast, according to a photo that the SBU posted showing its leader, Vasyl Malyuk, looking at a map of the strikes.

But so far, no damage to the airfields or the planes on them has been reported.

Russia is likely to respond to The Spiderweb with more massive drone and missile attacks on civilian sites.

“I’m afraid they’ll use Oreshnik again,” Fesenko said, referring to Russia’s most advanced ballistic missile, which can speed up to 12,300 kilometres per hour (7,610 miles per hour), or 10 times the speed of sound, and was used in November to strike a plant in eastern Ukraine.

Today, three Palestinians have been killed and 35 wounded by Israeli fire near an aid distribution centre in the Gaza Strip’s southern city of Rafah. The attack came a day after Israeli tanks opened fire on thousands of desperate and hungry Palestinians at the same site, killing at least 31 people. One person was also shot dead at another distribution site near the Netzarim Corridor in central Gaza the same day.

There are currently only four such sites distributing food to Gaza’s starving population of two million people, who for nearly three months were forced to contend with a full Israeli blockade that prevented the entry of all aid into the enclave.

On May 19, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu magnanimously opted to allow a resumption of “minimal” aid deliveries to Gaza, having determined that impending mass starvation was a “red line” that might jeopardise the undying support of the US, Israel’s traditional partner in crime and the primary enabler of its slaughter.

And yet these mass killings suggest that the new “minimal” arrangement offers Palestinians a decidedly horrific choice: either die of starvation or die trying to obtain food – not, of course, that these are the only two options for dying in a genocidal war in which Israel has indiscriminately bombed hospitals, refugee camps and everything else that can be bombed, killing more than 54,400 people.

The aid distribution hubs are run by a sketchy new outfit called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), initially an Israeli brainchild that operates as a private aid organisation registered in both Switzerland and the US state of Delaware. As The Guardian newspaper noted, the GHF has “no experience distributing food in a famine zone”. It does, however, have ties to the US and Israeli governments and employs former US military and intelligence officers.

So it is that food distribution in Gaza now transpires under the supervision of armed US security contractors at hubs conveniently located near Israeli military positions. The four sites that are currently operational are located in central and southern Gaza while a significant part of the enclave’s population is in the north. To reach the hubs, many Palestinians must walk long distances and cross Israeli military lines, further endangering their lives.

No mechanism is in place to distribute food to elderly, sick or wounded Palestinians – not to mention starving people unable to engage in such physical exertion in the hopes of putting something in their stomachs.

Furthermore, the GHF initiative feeds into Israel’s forced displacement scheme whereby surviving Palestinians will be concentrated in the south in preparation for their eventual expulsion, as per US President Donald Trump’s plan for a reborn Gaza Strip largely devoid of Palestinians.

In other words, the GHF is not in Gaza to alleviate hunger or cater to the needs of its population; rather, the food distribution hubs are a lucrative PR stunt aimed at creating a “humanitarian” distraction from a continuing policy of deliberate starvation and genocide.

The United Nations and aid organisations have lambasted the weaponisation of humanitarian aid while the situation was apparently too much to handle even for Jake Wood, the former US marine sniper who served as the GHF’s executive director before his recent resignation on the grounds that “it is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence”.

The massacres of the past two days are not the first such incidents to occur on the GHF’s watch. Since the launch of the initiative in late May, there have been numerous killings of Palestinians near distribution points. According to Gaza’s Government Media Office, the total number of people killed while seeking aid from this scheme has reached 52 so far.

And yet the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza trying to engage in that most necessary human activity of eating is hardly new. Recall that on February 29, 2024, at least 112 desperate Palestinians were massacred while queueing for flour southwest of Gaza City. More than 750 were wounded.

After that particular episode, then-US President Joe Biden announced that the US would airdrop food into Gaza, another costly PR spectacle incapable of providing even a drop in the bucket in terms of the humanitarian needs of the population. A more straightforward and efficient move would obviously have been to pressure the Israelis to cease blocking aid trucks from entering Gaza by land – and for the US to, you know, cease bombarding Israel with billions of dollars in aid and weaponry.

As it turned out, airdrops can be lethal too, and just a week after Biden’s announcement, five Palestinians were killed when a parachute attached to an aid pallet failed to open. To be sure, there are few things more abominably ironic than hungry people being killed by food aid literally crashing onto their heads.

Call it humanitarian slaughter.

Then there was Biden’s $230m humanitarian aid pier, which shut down in July after a mere 25 days of service. It was heavily criticised by aid groups as another expensive, complex and ineffective means of getting food and other aid into Gaza. But then again, effectiveness was never the point.

Now, if the GHF’s Gaza debut is any indication, the militarised distribution of food will continue to provide opportunities for mass killing as crowds of starving Palestinians gather around aid hubs. The phrase “shooting fish in a barrel” comes to mind – as if the Gaza Strip weren’t enough of a barrel already.

To be sure, the idea of luring starving people to specific geographical points to facilitate Israel’s genocidal conquest is singularly diabolical. And as the US persists in enabling Israel’s fish-in-a-barrel approach, any remotely moral world would refuse to stomach the arrangement any longer.

“Some anti-Ukrainian sentiments are frequently combined with nationalisme in Poland,” says one author.