Operation Spider's Web
This week we talk about drone warfare, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and total war.We also discuss casualty numbers, population superiority, and lingering munitions.Recommended Book: The Burning Earth by Sunil AmrithTranscriptEight years after Russia launched a halfheartedly concealed invasion of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, under the guise of helping supposedly oppressed Russian-speakers and Russia loyalists in the area, in February of 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.This invasion followed months of military buildup along the two countries’ shared borders, and was called a special military operation by Russian President Putin. It was later reported that this was intended to be a quick, one or a few day decapitation attack against Ukraine, Russia’s forces rapidly closing the distance between the border and Ukraine’s capitol, Kyiv, killing or imprisoning all the country’s leadership, replacing it with a puppet government loyal to Putin, and that would be that.Ukraine had been reorienting toward the European Union and away from Russia’s sphere of influence, and Russia wanted to put a stop to that realignment and bring the country fully back under its control, as was the case before 2014, when a series of protests turned into an uprising that caused their then-leader, a puppet of Russia, to flee the country; he, of course, fled to Russia.On paper, Ukraine was at a massive disadvantage in this renewed conflict, as Russia is a global-scale player, while Ukraine is relatively small, and back in 2014 had one of its major ports and a huge chunk of its territory stolen by Russia.Russia also has nukes, has a massive conventional military, and has a far larger economy and population. Analysts near-universally assumed Ukraine would collapse under the weight of Russia’s military, perhaps holding out for weeks or months if they were really skillful and lucky, but probably days.That didn’t end up being the case. Despite Russia’s substantial and multifarious advantages, Ukraine managed to hold out against the initial invasion, against subsequent pushes, and then managed to launch its own counterattacks. For more than three years, it has held its ground against Russia’s onslaught, against continuous land incursions, and against seemingly endless aerial attacks by jets, by bombers, and by all sorts of rockets, missiles, and drones.It’s difficult, if not impossible, to determine actual casualty and fatality numbers in this conflict, as both sides are incentivized to adjust these figures, either to show how horrible the other side is, or to make it seem like they’re suffering less than they are for moral purposes.But it’s expected that Russia will hit a milestone of one million casualties sometime in the summer of 2025, if it hasn’t actually hit that number already, and it’s estimated that as many as 250,000 Russian soldiers have already been killed in Ukraine.For context, that’s about five-times as many deaths as Russia suffered in all the wars it fought, post-WWII (as both the Soviet Union and Russia), combined. That’s also fifteen-times as many fatalities as they suffered in their ten-year-long war in Afghanistan, and ten-times as many deaths as in their 13-year-long war in Chechnya.It’s also estimated that Russia has lost something like 3,000-4,000 tanks, 9,000 armored vehicles, 13,000 artillery systems, and more than 400 air defense systems in the past year, alone; those numbers vary a bit depending on who you listen to, but those are likely the proper order of magnitude.The country is rapidly shifting to a full-scale war footing, originally having intended to make do with a few modern systems and a whole lot of antique, Soviet military hardware they had in storage to conduct this blitzkrieg attack on Ukraine, but now they’re having to reorient basically every facet of society and their economy toward this conflict, turning a huge chunk of their total manufacturing base toward producing ammunition, tanks, missiles, and so on.Which, to be clear, is something they’re capable of doing. Russia is currently on pace to replace this hardware, and then some, which is part of why other European governments are increasing their own military spending right now: the idea being that once Russia has finished their reorientation toward the production of modern military hardware, they’ll eventually find themselves with more tanks, missiles, and drones than they can use in Ukraine, and they’ll need to aim them somewhere, or else will find themselves have to pay upkeep on all this stuff as it gathers dust and slowly becomes unusable.The theory, then, is that they’ll have to open up another conflict just to avoid being bogged down in too much surplus weaponry; so maybe they’ll try their luck in the Baltics, or perhaps start shipping more hardware to fellow travelers, terrorists and separatists, in places like Moldova.In the meantime, though, Russian forces are continuing to accrue gains in Ukraine, but very, very slowly. This year they’ve captured an average of about 50 meters of Ukrainian territory per day, at a cost of around 1,140 casualties per day, of which about 975 are fatalities.That’s a huge and horrific meatgrinder, but there’s little pushback against the invasion in Russia at this point, as speaking out against it has been criminalized, and a lot of high-profile fines, arrests, kidnappings, and seeming assassinations of people who have said anything even a little bit negative about the war or the Russian government have apparently been effective.Ukraine is holding its own, then, but Russia still has the upper-hand, and will likely have even more weight behind it in the coming months, as its manufacturing base pivots further and further toward a total war stance.What I’d like to talk about today is a seeming renewed effort on the part of Ukraine to strike within Russian territory, taking out military assets, but also destabilizing Russian support for the war, focusing especially on one such recent, wildly successful asymmetric attack.—In addition to all the other advantages Russia has in this conflict, Ukraine’s population is about one-fourth the size of Russia’s, and that means even if Ukraine is, by some measures, losing one soldier to every two that Russia loses, over time Russia is still gaining firmer and firmer footing; that’s a war of attrition Russia will eventually win just because their population is bigger.By some indications, the Russian government is also using this conflict as an opportunity to clear out its prisons, offering prisoners a chance at freedom if they go to the front line and survive for a period of time, many of them dying, and thus freeing up prison space and resources that would otherwise be spent on them, but also sending a disproportionate number of their poor, their disliked ethnic and religious groups, and their young radicals into the meatgrinder, forcing them to serve as cannon fodder, as most of those people will die or be grievously wounded, but those people also, as a side-benefit, will no longer be a problem for the government.Russia is also bringing in troops from its ally, North Korea, to fight on the front lines, alongside all the weapon systems and ammo it’s been procuring from them and other allies, like China and Iran.So while this is obviously not great for Russia, losing that many fighters for relatively small gains, they’ve also figured out a way to make it not so bad, and in some ways even a positive development, according to their metrics for positive, anyway, and again, if they can keep warm bodies flooding to the front lines, they will eventually win, even if it takes a while—at their current rate of advance, it would take about 116 years to capture the rest of the country—and even if the body count is shockingly high by the time that happens.To counter this increasing advantage that Russia has been leveraging, Ukraine has been leaning more heavily on drones, as the invasion has progressed.In this context, a drone might be anything from the off-the-shelf, quadcopter models that hobbyists use to race and shoot aerial photographs, to higher-end, jet or missile or glider-like models similar to what major military forces, like the US military, use to scout and photograph enemy forces and terrain, and in some cases launch assassination attacks or bombing raids on the same.They can be low-flying quad-copters, or they can be something like lingering, unmanned missiles or jet fighters, then, and they can be completely unarmed, or they can be rigged with grenades to drop, bombs to use in a suicide attack, missiles to fire, shotguns to blast enemy fighters in the face, or nets to ensnare enemy drones.Drones of all shapes and sizes have been fundamental to the way modern militaries operate since the 1990s, when early, remotely piloted aircraft, like the Predator drone, were used for aerial reconnaissance purposes in mostly Middle Eastern war zones.Later versions were then equipped with bombs and missiles, and in some cases have even been used for the assassination of individuals, as was the case with a drone that fired a modified Hellfire missile that was reportedly use to kill an al Quaeda leader in Afghanistan in 2022, the missile deploying six large blades before hitting its intended target, shredding him instead of blowing him up, and thus avoiding civilian casualties.Mexican cartels have also been enthusiastically adopting drones in their attacks and assassinations, their so-called dronero drone-operators often rigging off-the-shelf drones with deployable bombs, allowing them to fly the drone into an enemy’s home or other supposedly safe space, killing them with minimum risk to the attacker, and with sufficient fog-of-war so that if the attacker doesn’t want to be known, they can maintain anonymity.Ukraine’s military has been using drones from the beginning of the conflict in a similarly asymmetric manner, but they’ve also been improving upon the state-of-the-art by coming up with sophisticated new uses for existing drone models, while also developing their own drones and software systems, allowing them to maintain the meat-grinder Russian forces face with fewer Ukrainian casualties, while also giving them new opportunities to strike Russia within its own borders.That latter point is important, as for pretty much this entire conflict, Ukraine’s allies have provided them with weapons, but with the stipulation that they cannot fire those weapons into Russia territory—the fear being that Russia might use that as justification to expand the scope of the conflict. Those stipulations have been lightening, with some allies now saying it’s fine that Ukraine uses these weapons however they like, but the Ukrainians have been pushed into making more of their own weapon systems in part because they can use those systems however they choose, without limits, including being able to target infrastructure within Russian territory.One such innovation is a speedboat-based anti-aircraft missile system called the Magura V7, which reportedly shot down two Russian Su-30 warplanes, which are roughly equivalent to the US F-16, in May of 2025, which was the first-ever successful downing of fighter jets by drone boats.These boats can hang out in open water for days at a time, watching and waiting for Russian jets, and then ambushing them, seemingly out of nowhere. It’s also been speculated that a recent attack on a vital supply channel for Russian forces in occupied Crimea, the Crimean Bridge, was conducted using an underwater drone, which if true could signal a new frontier of sorts in this conflict, as Ukraine has already managed to menace Russia’s Black Sea fleet into near-inoperability using conventional weaponry, and the widespread deployment of more difficult to detect underwater drones could make any Russian naval presence even more difficult, if not impossible, to maintain.Ukraine has been coming up with all sorts of interesting countermeasures for Russia’s anti-drone tech, including connecting their spy drones to the drone’s operator using thin strands of fiber optic cable, which renders electronic warfare countermeasures all but useless, alongside efforts to make attack drones more capable if cut off from their operators, allowing the drones to continue tracking targets over time, and to follow through with an attack if their communication signals are jammed.A new approach to offensively leveraging drones, which was the biggest drone attack by Ukraine, so far, and the most impactful, was called Operation Spider’s Web, and was deployed on June 1 of this year. It involved 117 drones launching coordinated attacks across Russia, successfully striking about 20 high-end Russian military aircraft, ten of which were destroyed.This is notable in part because some of the aircraft in question were strategic bombers and A-50 military spy planes, both of which are incredibly expensive and valuable; and Russia only has two of that type of spy plane. But it’s also notable because some of these targets were struck far from Ukraine, one of the targeted air bases located about 2,700 miles away, which for context is nearly the width of the continental United States.The Ukrainian military was able to accomplish this synchronized attack, which took about a year and a half to plan, by concealing drone parts in wooden shipping containers that were designed to look like a type of mobile wooden cabin that are commonly carried on flatbed trucks throughout the area. Those parts were assembled into finished drones inside Russia’s borders, and then on June 1, all at the same time, the roofs of these mobile containers slid open, the drones flew out, and they made for their targets simultaneously.This attack is said to have caused billions of dollars in damage, and to have hit about a third of Russia’s cruise missile carriers.Earlier this week, Russia launched what’s being called the biggest overnight drone bombardment of the war, so far, launching 479 drones at Ukrainian targets, alongside 20 missiles of different types. The Ukrainian military says it destroyed 277 drones and 19 missiles mid-flight, and that only 10 drones and missiles hit their targets. One person was reportedly injured by the barrage; though like all numbers in this conflict, it’s impossible to know whether these figures are real or not.This is of-a-kind with other recent attacks by Russia against Ukrainian targets, in that it was aimed at several military, but also many major civilian targets—apparently with the intention of demoralizing civilians and soldiers, alike. And most of these attacks are overnight attacks, because it’s more difficult to see the drones and take them out before they hit their target when it’s dark outside.That said, there are some murmurs in the analyst community that Russia might not be able to escalate things too much, right now, despite the big success of Operation Spider’s Web, as it’s already throwing a lot at Ukraine. Both countries are seemingly going all-out in their offensives on the theory that if peace talks do ever go anywhere, as some foreign governments, including Trump’s US government, would prefer, the side that seems to be doing the best and have the best prospects at that moment will have an advantage in those talks.Ukraine’s attacks within Russia have mostly targeted fuel and ammo depots, drone manufacturing facilities, and similar combat-related infrastructure. There’s a chance they might also aim at demoralizing the Russian public through attacks on civilian targets at some point, but they seem to be sticking with military targets for now, and that would seem to be a better strategy, considering that speaking out against the war is illegal and severely punished in Russia—so hitting Russia’s capacity for maintaining the invasion would be more likely to lead to positive outcomes for Ukraine, as that could hobble Russia’s capacity to invade, which in turn could reduce the populations’ sense of the governments power.However those talks, if they do eventually happen in earnest, play out, there’s apparently now a change in tone and tact, as Ukraine has shown that it’s capable of striking Russian targets deep within Russia, and it’s likely making things tricky for Russia’s economy, as they’ll now have to spend more time and resources checking all sorts of shipping containers and other possible points of ingress, lest they contain drone parts or other weapons.Not a huge deal, all things considered, perhaps, a little extra work and expense across the economy but one more of many papercuts Ukraine seems to be inflicting on its more powerful foe that, in aggregate, might eventually force that foe to find a way to back off.Show Noteshttps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz708lpzgxrohttps://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/03/world/europe/ukraine-russia-war-drones-deaths.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/08/world/europe/ukraine-russia-drones-weapons.htmlhttps://www.twz.com/news-features/inside-ukraines-fiber-optic-drone-warhttps://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/04/russias-black-sea-has-been-functionally-inactive-for-over-1-year/https://www.twz.com/news-features/inside-ukraines-fiber-optic-drone-warhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_warfarehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spider%27s_Webhttps://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/predator-drone-transformed-military-combathttps://www.wsj.com/world/ukraine-russia-drone-attack-bombers-cc77e534https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-believes-russia-response-ukraine-drone-attack-not-over-yet-expects-multi-2025-06-07/https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/ukraine-hit-fewer-russian-planes-than-it-estimated-us-officials-say-2025-06-04/https://defensescoop.com/2025/04/03/ukraine-russian-tanks-destroyed-attack-drones-cavoli/https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-battlefield-woes-ukrainehttps://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-5-2025https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine This is a public episode. 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