Rebeccah Heinrichs
In a stunning operation, on June 1, 2025, the Ukrainian SBU Security Service carried out Operation Spiderweb. The operation included a large-scale coordinated drone strike on five Russian air bases: Belaya, Dyagilevo, Ivanovo Severny,
Olenya, and Ukrainka stretching more than 2,000 miles into Russian territory and miles from one another. The Russians had sought to keep their strategic bombers dispersed to lower the risk of damage to a significant portion of the fleet if Ukraine could pull off a larger-scale attack. According to Ukraine, the Ukrainians damaged or destroyed 41 Russian aircraft including bombers. (It’s important to note that there has been no third-party verification of these numbers.)
Much of the public response from those who have been fearful of escalation was predictably alarmist due to Ukraine’s choice of target—those Russian bombers are highly valuable to Russia and can carry either conventional or nuclear weapons.
The concern for Ukraine escalating the war is in keeping with the Biden administration’s constant fear of escalation, which motivated the Biden policies to limit US support to Ukraine and to restrain the range and type of Ukrainian attacks.
The effect was that Ukraine could defend itself but only in limited ways that would not hurt the Russians “too much.” Thus, the war never had a strategy to enable Ukraine to win a battlefield advantage over the Russians or to impose such a military defeat,
even tactically, to convince the Russians that even though they had help from China, North Korea, and Iran, the defending nation — Ukraine — had committed backing from the entire NATO alliance, including the United States. Thus, the Russians grew in confidence and the war basically stayed even and is grinding on in a terrible and tragic war of attrition.
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