Within the annals of excessive espionage, derring-do and profitable madcap army schemes, Artem Tymofieiev certainly deserves his place. The Russians will surely wish to know his whereabouts at present. A nationwide manhunt is underway.
The mysterious Mr Tymofieiev has been recognized because the Ukrainian undercover agent who ran one of the vital audacious and brilliantly executed army operations in fashionable historical past.
Operation Chastise, the Dambusters Raid – through which RAF Lancasters breached two Ruhr dams with bouncing bombs in 1943 – has lengthy been the yardstick in opposition to which different unlikely coups de principal have been measured.
I’d argue that Operation Spider’s Internet, which the Ukrainian Secret Service – the SBU – executed on Sunday afternoon, exceeds even that exploit in breathtaking scope and influence. Concurrently, throughout three time zones and hundreds of miles from the Ukrainian border, swarms of FPV (first-person view) kamikaze drones struck 4 Russian air bases.
These had been dwelling to the Kremlin’s strategic long-range bombers.
Yesterday Kyiv claimed that in a stroke it had destroyed 34 per cent of Russia‘s heavy bomber fleet, inflicting some $7billion price of injury.
Cell phone footage of palls of smoke rising from the bases through the assaults, video feed from the drones and satellite tv for pc pictures of the aftermath: all appear to bear out the declare.
The operation was an astonishing triumph. Russian army bloggers have likened the assault’s shock and devastation to that inflicted by the Japanese on the US Navy at Pearl Harbour. However how on earth did the Ukrainians handle to drag it off?
Russian media revealed a photograph of the suspected organiser of the airfield drone assaults, claiming he is Ukrainian
As extra info emerges from a triumphant Kyiv and a humiliated Moscow, we are able to begin to piece collectively the Spider’s Internet story.
Because the full-scale invasion of Ukraine started in February 2022, Russia’s heavy bomber fleet has induced widespread dying and destruction. Initially designed through the Chilly Struggle as strategic nuclear bombers, the plane have been repurposed to hold typical ‘stand-off’ cruise missiles.
These are launched from inside Russian airspace, effectively out of attain of Ukrainian air defence programs.
All three of the heavy bomber variants in service have immense payloads. The TU-95 ‘Bear’, a turboprop relic of the Fifties, can carry 16 air-launched cruise missiles. The TU-22 ‘Blinder’, Russia’s first supersonic bomber, has the capability to launch the supersonic Kh-22 missile, which has the pace to evade most Ukrainian air defences. The TU-160 ‘Blackjack’, Russia’s most fashionable strategic bomber, can carry as much as 24 Kh-15 cruise missiles on one mission.
These planes have introduced nightly terror to Ukrainian cities.
Nothing may very well be achieved to cease them, it appeared.
Because of the rising vary and accuracy of the Ukrainian assault drone fleet, the bombers had been moved to bases deep inside Russia that weren’t weak to retaliation. Some had been as distant as Siberia and the Arctic Circle.
So, 18 months in the past, President Volodymyr Zelensky summoned SBU chief Lieutenant Common Vasyl Maliuk and instructed him to discover a approach to take the battle to the heavy bombers’ hideouts.
Ukraine’s drones had been hidden underneath the roofs of cellular cabins, which had been later mounted onto vehicles. They had been then piloted remotely to their targets
How although to strike hundreds of kilometres past the vary of Ukraine’s furthest- reaching missile or drone? To not point out penetrating one of many world’s most subtle air defence programs?
Then somebody had an concept that will need to have sounded loopy at first – like Barnes Wallis suggesting his bouncing bomb.
Why not drive the kamikaze drones in vehicles as much as the perimeter of the air bases and launch them over the fence?
To do that, the drones would must be smuggled into Russia and hidden someplace safe. When the time got here to assault, the UAV swarms must be hid on industrial autos that might not arouse suspicion.
And that’s other than the problem of launching the drones on the targets in such a means that might not expose the operators or brokers on the bottom to fast reprisal or seize.
A base was wanted contained in the Russian Federation from which the Spider’s Internet logistics may very well be marshalled and the assault launched. That meant, after all, there must be a Ukrainian agent on the bottom, far behind enemy traces, at monumental private threat.
The indications are that the placement chosen for Spider’s Internet’s Russian ‘workplace’ – as President Zelensky referred to as it – was the small metropolis of Chelyabinsk. It lies greater than 1,000 miles east of Moscow however – and this might need been important for the smuggling side of the operation – solely 85 miles by highway north of the border with impartial Kazakhstan.
Russian mili-bloggers have recognized a warehouse in Chelyabinsk as being the Spider’s Internet hub. Rented for 350,000 rubles (£3,250) a month, this was allegedly the place the drones and their launchers had been assembled and despatched on their means. Zelensky additionally steered that the ‘workplace’ was subsequent door to the native headquarters of the FSB – the federal safety service that changed the KGB. He didn’t reveal the placement.
Head of Ukraine’s Safety Service Vasyl Maliuk seems at a map of an airfield amid Russia’s assault
However who was to run this extraordinarily complicated and excessive stakes operation?
The person whom the Russian Inside Ministry suspect of being the native mastermind is after all Artem Tymofieiev. His identify and {photograph} are being circulated by the authorities, his seize a precedence.
In response to Russian sources, Tymofieiev was born within the Ukrainian metropolis of Zhytomyr, lived in Kyiv and moved to Chelyabinsk ‘a number of years in the past’, working as an ‘entrepreneur’.
Was he a sleeper agent from the beginning? If that’s the case, he made no secret of his help for Ukraine, mates are alleged to have mentioned. However how might he be a menace in such a strategically insignificant place, hundreds of miles from the battle?
He was, as one Russian blogger has put it, ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothes’. The drones had been to be carried to the targets and launched remotely from picket cabins carried on the flat beds of heavy lorries. In response to President Zelensky they had been then piloted remotely to their targets.
4 air bases had been recognized: Belaya airfield in Irkutsk oblast, Siberia, greater than 4,000km from Ukraine; the Olenya air base within the Arctic Circle close to Murmansk; the Diaghilev air base in Ryazan oblast; and a base close to town of Ivanovo.
The right way to get the drones from the Kazakh border to those locations? Chelyabinsk is 2,000 miles from Murmansk, 1,750 miles to Irkutsk and greater than 1,000 miles to the opposite two bases.
However such distances are routinely traversed by Russian lorry drivers. And that was the brilliantly easy technique by which this high-tech assault was progressed.
Russian TU-95 Bear strategic bombers on the Olenya airbase on the Kola Peninsula being destroyed by Ukrainian drones hundreds of miles away from the entrance line
The explosion seen from a highway as bystanders are stopped of their tracks
‘Artem’ appears to have employed 4 unwitting heavy items drivers to move what they thought had been merely picket framed homes to completely different places throughout the Russian Federation. In response to the SBU, the drones had been hidden underneath the home roofs. In response to Russian sources, the vehicles had been all registered to ‘Artem’.
Driver Alexander Z, 55, from Chelyabinsk has reportedly instructed investigators he acquired an order to move ‘body homes’ to the Murmansk area from a businessman named Artem, who supplied the truck.
Driver Andrei M, 61, reportedly mentioned he was instructed by Artem to move picket homes to Irkutsk. Driver Sergey, 46, had an equivalent story. He was instructed to move modular homes to Ryazan. One other driver was despatched to Ivanovo.
So the scene was set for Spider’s Internet’s spectacular denouement.
The 48 hours main as much as Zero Hour noticed Ukraine’s intelligence companies demonstrating its capability to launch ever deeper strikes into enemy territory – and Russia placing again with document ferocity. Final Friday, Ukraine struck targets in Vladivostok, on the Pacific coast. Seven thousand miles from the frontier, this was the furthest that Ukraine had hit inside Russia.
The next night time, not less than seven folks had been killed and one other 69 injured, after a practice certain for Moscow was derailed by an explosion in Bryansk oblast, which borders Ukraine.
Retaliation was not lengthy coming. Inside hours Russia launched its largest drone blitz of the battle – 472 UAVs in a single night time.
The next morning, Sunday, June 1, a Russian missile struck a coaching floor in Dnipro oblast, killing 12 troopers and wounding 60 extra. This prompted the Commander of Land Forces Main Common Mykhailo Drapatyi to tender his resignation.
A blow for Ukraine. However as nothing to what it will strike in return.
Sunday, June 1, roughly 1pm native time. It’s Russia’s Navy Transport Aviation Day.
Whereas en route, Driver Alexander Z had been referred to as on his cellular by an unknown one who instructed him precisely the place to cease. This was the Rosneft petrol station subsequent to the Olenya air base.
Driver Andrei M had been briefed to park on the Teremok cafe in Usolye-Sibirskoye, beside the Belaya base. Virtually as quickly because the drivers stopped the place instructed, the world appeared to blow up round them.
In response to the SBU, the truck trailer roofs had been ‘remotely opened’ and the drone swarms launched from inside. They’d just a few hundred metres to succeed in their targets.
Shock was full and native defences helpless. As all 4 assaults had been launched on the similar time, it appears, no alert may very well be usefully circulated.
Social media footage of the Belaya assault seems to indicate drones rising from the rear trailer of Andrei M’s articulated wagon. It’s parked on the far aspect of a busy freeway which runs alongside the air base perimeter.
What seems like roofing panels are mendacity on the bottom beside the truck, suggesting that they had been blown off fairly than hinged.
Driver Sergey didn’t even get the prospect to cease earlier than the roof of his Scania truck’s trailer blew off and extra drones started flying out and in the direction of the goal base.
Some 117 kamikaze drones had been used within the assaults, based on President Zelensky, managed by the identical variety of pilots.
Every air base might have been hit by as many as 30 drones concurrently. Sources recommend that the SBU used Russia’s personal cellular community to speak with and information the big ‘quadcopter’ drones. To take action they will need to have had Russian sim playing cards or modems.
The targets had been sitting geese, the destruction immense.
The Ukrainians launched video from a drone flying over a line of Russian heavy bombers neatly parked at Belaya. One of many bombers is hit by one other drone, which explodes because the digicam drone approaches.
Among the many 41 plane claimed destroyed by the Ukrainians is a Beriev A-50 early warning and management airplane, of which Russia has fewer than ten.
The primary satellite tv for pc pictures of the aftermath at Belaya seem to indicate six TU-22 kind bombers destroyed and a TU-95MS visibly broken.
‘We’ll strike them at sea, within the air and on the bottom,’ the SBU declared. ‘If wanted we’ll get them from the underground too.’
And what of the mysterious Mr Tymofieiev? All these behind the operation ‘have been in Ukraine for a very long time’ now, the SBU claims. Spider’s Internet’s triumph, it appears, is full.
- Extra reporting by Oleksandr Kostiuchenko
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