The impact of Ukraine’s audacious drone attack deep inside Russia over the weekend has been captured in satellite imagery which suggests a number of strategic bombers were severely damaged or outright destroyed.
Carried out on Sunday, “Operation Spiderweb” was planned out over the course of 18 months and executed by Ukraine’s SBU security service. It saw truckloads of drones smuggled thousands of kilometres into Russian territory before they were unleashed close to airbases to destroy as many aircraft as possible, officials in Kyiv said.
In a rare confirmation of such losses, Russia said Ukraine attacked airfields across five regions, causing several aircraft to catch fire. “The attacks occurred in the Murmansk, Irkutsk, Ivanovo, Ryazan, and Amur regions. Air defences repelled the assaults in all but two regions, Murmansk and Irkutsk,” Moscow’s defence ministry claimed on Sunday.
New satellite images from Capella Space, a satellite company, took a before-and-after view of the airfield located in Irkutsk, a Siberian region.
The images from 2 June, a day after Ukraine’s operation, feature the dismantled debris and ashen remains of several aircraft located along the runway of the Belaya military air base or parked in protective revetments nearby.
The latest images are from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites which direct energy beams at the Earth and detect echoes, allowing identification of small topographical details.
Experts have said that the destruction seen in these images confirm Russia suffered the loss of multiple aircraft.
"Based on the debris visible, comparison to recent satellite images and released drone footage from Telegram posted to Twitter, I can see the destruction of several aircraft," said John Ford, a research associate at the California-based James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
He added that the SAR satellite imagery seen by him purportedly shows the remnants of two destroyed Tu-22 Backfires – long-range, supersonic strategic bombers that have been used to launch missile strikes against Ukraine.
The SAR images and the footage of the strikes posted on social media also indicated that four strategic Tu-95 heavy bombers had been destroyed or severely damaged, Mr Ford added.
In Kyiv, Ukraine’s SBU security agency said that the operation resulted in the loss of a total of 41 Russian warplanes.
Explosive-laden drones were hidden in the roofs of wooden sheds, which were then loaded onto trucks and driven to the perimeter of the air bases, according to a Ukrainian security official.
The roof panels of the sheds were lifted off by a remotely-activated mechanism, allowing the drones to fly out and begin their attack, the official said.
The Independent has not verified the claims.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky called the attack “absolutely brilliant”, lauding the operation which hit Russian targets up to 4,300km (2,670 miles) from the war’s frontline. The preliminary assessment from the Ukrainian military confirmed damages to 12 additional aircraft after the operation over the weekend.
"After processing additional information from various sources and verifying it ... we report that the total (Russian) losses amounted to 41 military aircraft, including strategic bombers and other types of combat aircraft," the SBU said in an update.
It added that the damage amounted to $7bn, and 34 per cent of the strategic cruise missile carriers at Russia's main airfields were hit.
