Ukraine’s Operation Spider’s Web Shows Future of Drone Warfare

Ukraine’s Operation Spider’s Web Shows Future of Drone Warfare

A Ukrainian special forces unit prepares a Ukraine-made drone for an aerial reconnaissance mission in the country's  Zaporizhzhia region on May 23.
A Ukrainian special forces unit prepares a Ukraine-made drone for an aerial reconnaissance mission in the country's Zaporizhzhia region on May 23. Dmytro Smolienko/Ukrinform/Getty Images

Ukraine said it had used 117 drones to target airfields deep in Russian territory. The daring attack demonstrated low-cost precision strikes accessible to almost any state or militant group.

June 3, 2025 5:08 pm (EST)

A Ukrainian special forces unit prepares a Ukraine-made drone for an aerial reconnaissance mission in the country's  Zaporizhzhia region on May 23.
A Ukrainian special forces unit prepares a Ukraine-made drone for an aerial reconnaissance mission in the country's Zaporizhzhia region on May 23. Dmytro Smolienko/Ukrinform/Getty Images
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Michael C. Horowitz is senior fellow for technology and innovation at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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In a daring and unexpected attack, Ukraine said it had used 117 attack drones to target airfields deep inside Russian territory. Named “Operation Spider’s Web” by Ukrainian officials, the assault required Ukraine to secretly smuggle the drones into Russia over several months.

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Ukraine has alleged that it struck forty-one planes with the drones, including a third of the bombers Russia uses as strategic cruise-missile carriers. Experts believe that this could negatively affect Russia’s ability to continue its launch of cruise missiles against Ukrainian targets. The Russian Defense Ministry has acknowledged the attack and the damage to several of its aircraft, but it disputed the extent of the assault.

Operation Spider’s Web has left a ripple effect that is still being felt in the aftermath of the attack. Here is why these drone strikes were so remarkable, and how they could affect the future of conflict.

How did the Ukrainians pull off Operation Spider’s Web and why was it so significant?

Operation Spider’s Web used commercial transportation, such as trucks, to smuggle large numbers of one-way attack drones for launch close to airfields across Russia—from the country’s western border with Ukraine all the way to Siberia. Vasyl Maliuk, head of the Security Service of Ukraine, said that the “drones were smuggled into Russia inside wooden cabins mounted on the back of lorries and concealed below remotely operated detachable roofs.”

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The attack was a surprise. Russia apparently had no idea it was coming, and the strikes once again demonstrated Ukraine’s ability to be at the cutting edge of technology and tactics. Ukraine has consistently and successfully leveraged and integrated everything from old military technology and off-the-shelf commercial systems to artificial intelligence (AI) for its military operations. This has been a difference maker in the war since its early days, giving Ukraine new and unexpected vectors to attack Russian forces and territory.

The frame is split into two images. On the left is a Ukrainian officer review plans and photos of planes. On the right is trailer can be seen with smoke billowing out of it.
Left: Head of Ukraine's Security Service Vasyl Maliuk looks at a map of an airfield in a handout picture released June 1. | Right: A drone lifts off from wooden sheds loaded onto a truck at the perimeter of a Russian airbase in a social video on June 1. Left: Security Service of Ukraine/Reuters | Right: Social Media/Reuters

This operation is another illustration of the flexibility Ukraine has relied upon throughout the conflict. By attacking airfields with Russian nuclear bombers like the Tu-95, Ukraine has shown that it is capable of using emerging capabilities to strike deep in enemy territory in a coordinated fashion while it continues to hold its own in its fight to recapture territory.

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Ukraine’s devastating attack demonstrates once again that we have entered the era of precise mass in war. The combination of AI and autonomous weapons, precision guidance, and commercial manufacturing mean that low-cost precision strikes are now accessible to almost any state or militant group.

What effect might this attack have on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine?

The attack will not change the balance of forces along Ukraine’s frontlines, but it does show the country’s ability to strike in ways that will undoubtedly shape Russian expectations on the future of the conflict.

For example, the damage Ukraine allegedly caused to at least 40 Russian aircraft, including valuable strategic platforms that would cost billions to replace, proves yet again Ukraine’s determination to resist Russia’s invasion and continued military operations.

How have drones had a different role in this war compared to past conflicts?

The Russia-Ukraine War has seen the rise of an array of military capabilities—including the use of drones en masse as one-way attack systems—previously only used in small quantities or considered in theory.

Prior to the war, people typically thought of drones as remotely-piloted platforms, like the MQ-9 Reaper flown by the United States military. These are large systems that can loiter thousands of feet in the air for days to conduct surveillance missions and/or fire precision Hellfire missiles against potential targets.

Now, the term drone can refer to a range of things. This includes platforms similar to the MQ-9 Reaper, with Ukraine’s use of Turkey’s TB-2, particularly prominent early in the war. There is also the tactical use of quadcopters for small-unit surveillance, first-person view (FPV) one-way attack systems flown in short ranges into targets, and longer range one-way attack systems like the Iranian-built Shahed-136, which can go hundreds or thousands of kilometers and that has been used regularly by Russia in this conflict.

The use of these drones for attack has become a new, ubiquitous form of conventional warfare. Many are based on commercially-available technology and they are relatively cheap—from as little as a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands of dollars. They are easy to produce and often have open architectures, which means the software is easy to update in response to jamming or other defensive countermeasures. These drones can now serve as supplements—or replacements in some instances—for traditional artillery or more expensive cruise missiles.

In what way have drones changed this conflict’s dynamic, and how have they developed during it?

Producing one-way attack drones of different sizes and ranges at speed and scale have helped Ukraine maintain an edge throughout the war. For example, the use of shorter-range one-way attack drones and FPV drones now generate up to 80 percent of the casualties along the front lines, helping Ukraine compete with larger Russian forces and providing additional options for generating firepower.

Operation Spider’s Web also appears to show the growing use of AI in one-way attack drones. AI in this context does not mean the most advanced and expensive large language models, but often simple algorithms trained on very specific datasets.

For example, there are reports that algorithms Ukraine used for at least some of the attack were trained on images of models of Russian aircraft found at museums in Ukraine, and may have used open-source autopilot systems. Autopilot, of course, has been around for decades. We are now beginning to see the use of AI for more autonomous operations if operators lose communications due to jamming or a datalink is not possible given the technologies and distances involved.

Is the success of this operation the result of lax Russian security or have the Ukrainians exposed a vulnerability that military leaders all over the world should worry about?

There is a lot we don’t know about Operation Spider’s Web, including the extent to which Ukraine exploited specific vulnerabilities in Russian security. The attack’s concept shows, however, that critical infrastructure and military installations in many places around the world could be at great risk.

Just as the overflights of US military bases over the last few years have generated concerns about their vulnerability to attack from small drones, Operation Spider’s Web makes clear that critical and military infrastructure face vulnerabilities more broadly.

How else could this operation influence the future of combat and conflicts across the globe?

Precision strike used to be something only the most advanced states could access, and traditional precision strike weapons like the Tomahawk cruise missile cost millions of dollars per shot. Now, more actors have the ability to deliver precision strikes at ever greater distances, even if their systems are not incredibly sophisticated. 

This ability to use precise mass capabilities at speed and scale—especially when fused with advancing AI for guidance—places enormous pressure on defensive measures. Think of the U.S. Navy, which has spent billions of dollars in the Red Sea in recent years to defend itself and commercial shipping from inexpensive precise mass systems used by Yemen’s Houthi rebels.

Ukraine’s latest attack clearly shows that even targets deep in a country’s territory could now be at risk. This will create new incentives for hardening (building shelters to protect assets from simple attacks), resiliency (spreading out assets to avoid putting them all at risk in case of an attack), and countermeasures (investing more in lower-cost methods that can defeat one-way attack drones, such as directed energy).

This work represents the views and opinions solely of the author. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

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Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Sign up to receive CFR President Mike Froman’s analysis on the most important foreign policy story of the week, delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon. Subscribe to The World This Week. In the Middle East, Israel and Iran are engaged in what could be the most consequential conflict in the region since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. CFR’s experts continue to cover all aspects of the evolving conflict on CFR.org. While the situation evolves, including the potential for direct U.S. involvement, it is worth touching on another recent development in the region which could have far-reaching consequences: the diffusion of cutting-edge U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) technology to leading Gulf powers. The defining feature of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy is his willingness to question and, in many cases, reject the prevailing consensus on matters ranging from European security to trade. His approach to AI policy is no exception. Less than six months into his second term, Trump is set to fundamentally rewrite the United States’ international AI strategy in ways that could influence the balance of global power for decades to come. In February, at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris, Vice President JD Vance delivered a rousing speech at the Grand Palais, and made it clear that the Trump administration planned to abandon the Biden administration’s safety-centric approach to AI governance in favor of a laissez-faire regulatory regime. “The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety,” Vance said. “It will be won by building—from reliable power plants to the manufacturing facilities that can produce the chips of the future.” And as Trump’s AI czar David Sacks put it, “Washington wants to control things, the bureaucracy wants to control things. That’s not a winning formula for technology development. We’ve got to let the private sector cook.” The accelerationist thrust of Vance and Sacks’s remarks is manifesting on a global scale. Last month, during Trump’s tour of the Middle East, the United States announced a series of deals to permit the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia to import huge quantities (potentially over one million units) of advanced AI chips to be housed in massive new data centers that will serve U.S. and Gulf AI firms that are training and operating cutting-edge models. These imports were made possible by the Trump administration’s decision to scrap a Biden administration executive order that capped chip exports to geopolitical swing states in the Gulf and beyond, and which represents the most significant proliferation of AI capabilities outside the United States and China to date. The recipe for building and operating cutting-edge AI models has a few key raw ingredients: training data, algorithms (the governing logic of AI models like ChatGPT), advanced chips like Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) or Tensor Processing Units (TPUs)—and massive, power-hungry data centers filled with advanced chips.  Today, the United States maintains a monopoly of only one of these inputs: advanced semiconductors, and more specifically, the design of advanced semiconductors—a field in which U.S. tech giants like Nvidia and AMD, remain far ahead of their global competitors. To weaponize this chokepoint, the first Trump administration and the Biden administration placed a series of ever-stricter export controls on the sale of advanced U.S.-designed AI chips to countries of concern, including China.  The semiconductor export control regime culminated in the final days of the Biden administration with the rollout of the Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion, more commonly known as the AI diffusion rule—a comprehensive global framework for limiting the proliferation of advanced semiconductors. The rule sorted the world into three camps. Tier 1 countries, including core U.S. allies such as Australia, Japan, and the United Kingdom, were exempt from restrictions, whereas tier 3 countries, such as Russia, China, and Iran, were subject to the extremely stringent controls. 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What the Gulf countries lack in terms of semiconductor prowess and AI talent, they make up for with abundant capital, energy, and accommodating regulations. The Gulf countries are well-positioned for massive AI infrastructure buildouts. The question is simply, using whose technology—American or Chinese—and on what terms? In Saudi Arabia and the UAE, it will be American technology for now. The question remains whether the diffusion of the most powerful dual-use technologies of our day will bind foreign users to the United States and what impact it will have on the global balance of power.  We welcome your feedback on this column. Let me know what foreign policy issues you’d like me to address next by replying to [email protected].

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