Drunk Drivers, Burned Trucks, Dead Courier: Inside Ukraine’s Wildest Drone Strike

The Wall Street Journal published new details about Ukraine’s SBU drone operation “Spider Web,” revealing how it nearly failed several times.

The strike was first delayed after truck drivers hired to transport drones got drunk during the May holidays.

Later, one truck lost its roof on the road, exposing the drones; the driver was tricked into believing they were for tracking animals and continued the trip.

On June 1, the day of the attack, contact with one driver suddenly disappeared. He was later found dead, and his truck completely burned.

The entire operation was coordinated by a secret husband-and-wife agent team who built around 150 drones, passed SBU polygraph tests, and even survived a three-hour FSB interrogation before escaping Russia.

The Security Service of Ukraine detained and arrested in Odesa a foreign vessel that was part of russia's shadow fleet and was illegally transporting Ukrainian agricultural products from the occupied Crimea. According to the case file, the owner of this ship was under the sanctions of the National Security Council of Ukraine, and in order to circumvent the restrictive measures, he regularly changed the name of the ship and the formal beneficiaries from third countries.

Employees of the SSU detected a dry cargo ship under the control of the russian federation in the commercial port of Odessa, where it arrived under the flag of an African country to take out a batch of steel pipes. It was established that on the eve of a full-scale war, the ship docked at least seven times in Sevastopol to illegally export agricultural products in the interests of the russian federation. At the end of January 2021, a ship illegally transported almost 7 thousand tons of grain from the Ukrainian peninsula to North Africa.

At the time of the ship's detention, the captain and 16 other crew members, all citizens of several Middle Eastern countries, were on board. During the search of the vessel, flight plans, pilot cards, cartographic materials and radio communication check logs with evidence of illegal entry into the ports of the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine were found.

SSU investigators have initiated criminal proceedings under four articles of the Criminal Code of Ukraine:
▪️ Part 3 Art. 110-2 (financing of actions committed for the purpose of violent change or overthrow of the constitutional order or seizure of state power, change of territory or state border of Ukraine);
▪️ Part 1 Art. 111 (treason);
▪️ Art. 291 (violation of the rules in force on transport);
▪️ ch. 2, 3 Art. 332-1 (violation of the procedure for entering and leaving the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine).

The vessel was seized for further transfer to the National Agency of Ukraine for Identification, Search and Management of Assets Obtained from Corruption and Other Crimes (ARMA)