🕸️ One year ago, Ukraine did the impossible. This week they released the full video. Here's what happened since, especially around airports.

On 1 June 2025, the SBU ran Operation Spiderweb: FPV drones hidden in the roofs of cargo trucks, parked near four airbases deep inside Russia, the panels opened by remote, the drones flown into the strategic bomber fleet as it sat on the tarmac. The SBU claimed 41 aircraft hit, including Tu-95 and Tu-22M3 bombers and an A-50 radar plane; independent OSINT later put the confirmed write-offs lower, in the low double digits. Either way it reached aircraft Russia cannot replace, with drones costing a few thousand dollars each.

The full operational video is out this week, on the first anniversary.

A strategic bomber is a decade-long, unreplaceable asset. The FPV that destroyed it can be built in a week, and it reached the tarmac by truck on a Russian motorway rather than by a 2.000-kilometer missile. The range problem was solved as a logistics problem.

This inverts the geography of deep strike. You no longer have to out-range an enemy's air defenses if you can drive underneath them. Every airbase, depot and parked high-value platform within reach of a road now sits inside the threat envelope of a drone that costs less than the fuel in the aircraft.

A year on, the uncomfortable question for Western air forces is whether their own bases would survive a Spiderweb of their own. Or their airports. The answer is no. What we can ask ourselves, then, is whether NATO forces have achieved any gains towards preventing such attacks.

The answer is, unfortunately, also no. As I sit here writing this, after getting stuck in Brussels yesterday due to a strike which could just as much have been a drone intrusion, overlooking Brussels airport, watching its gigantic perimeter, and the many hangars and logistics hubs along it, it becomes obvious that any strategy for countering small UAS intrusions into airports like these requires investments into detection and mitigation solutions which currently mostly don't exist, because existing solutions are cost-prohibitive. a few drone radars here and there and a few acoustics detection nodes don't solve this problem.

But there's hope. I'm in a very lucky position. I get to see and test new tech that will solve the cost problem for these calculations. And I can't wait to show you more within the next few months, both in terms of detection and interceptor solutions.

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