On the first morning of June, in five widely separated Russian regions, the roofs of innocuous trucks parked near long-range aviation bases opened by remote command.
Small first-person-view quadcopters lifted out and flew the last kilometre to their targets — Tupolev 95 and Tupolev 22M bombers, a Tupolev 160, an A-50 radar aircraft, the strategic spine of Moscow's air arm.
The operation, eighteen months in preparation, was carried out by a fraction of the assets that would normally be required for a strike of comparable consequence. According to the SBU, one hundred and seventeen drones were used; forty-one aircraft were hit. Two United States officials told Reuters about twenty aircraft were hit and ten destroyed. Ukraine put the damage at seven billion dollars; the Financial Times estimated the strike took out about twenty per cent of Russia's operational long-range aviation fleet. The aircraft hit cannot be replaced — production of the Tupolev 95 and Tupolev 22M3 ended with the Soviet Union.
Each drone cost a few thousand dollars; each Tupolev 160 costs roughly two hundred and fifty million dollars. Total drone cost of the strike was a rounding error against the bomber fleet's replacement value. It was, military historians will probably say, a Pearl Harbour moment for drone warfare — and a demonstration that the deterrent value of mass, distance and concrete shelter had been quietly retired in the course of a single morning.
The afterlife of Spider's Web is in the doctrine that followed it. Sheet XI — the counter-revolution — begins, in effect, on the second of June.
One launch point in Ukraine. Five Russian strategic air bases at the eastern and western extremities of the long-range aviation arm. The pattern is the point: distance ceased to be a defence.