Spiderweb Update – Chinese Satellite Images Show Destroyed Russian A-50 AEW&C

Ukraine’s Security Services (SBU) launched Operation Spiderweb on Sunday, that saw simultaneous drone strikes on five major Russian air bases in Murmansk, Ryazan, Irkutsk, Amur, and Ivanovo regions.

Statements by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and Lt. Gen Vasyl Malyuk the head of the SBU shortly after the attacks claimed to have destroyed and damaged more than 40 strategic aircraft including Tu-95, Tu-22 and other heavy bombers along with an A-50 airborne early warning and command (AEW&C) aircraft. This represented around a third of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet at a cost of more than $2 billion (some estimated as $7 billion).

Almost immediately, in the absence of third-party evidence, Russian official statements and a plethora of analysts and milbloggers, both Russian and international, began to question the figures claimed by Kyiv. However, by Tuesday afternoon evidence in the form of satellite imagery started to roll in and began to provide a clearer picture.

On Tuesday morning the Daily Telegraph, published open-source satellite images that showed a total of 13 destroyed aircraft at Murmansk’s Olenya and Irkutsk’s Belaya airfields – eight Tu-95s, four Tu-22s, and an An-23.

On Tuesday afternoon the open-source intelligence analyst Geoint published images provided by the Chinese Mizarvision satellite of the Severny Airbase in the Ivanovo region, 160 kilometers (100 miles) northeast of the Russian capital, Moscow. These showed several locations within the airfield that seemed to contain destroyed aircraft and a possibly damaged, blackened A-50 AEW&C aircraft on the tarmac at the Ivanovo air base northeast of the Russian capital, Moscow.

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Despite the continuing skepticism among social and mainstream media towards Ukraine’s claim that Spiderweb had destroyed 40 plus Russian aircraft, the General Staff doubled down on the figure in response to a query by Kyiv Post on Tuesday afternoon.

It said that, at 16:00 on Tuesday June 3, “After processing [unspecified] additional information from various sources and verifying it, which took some time, we report that the total occupant losses amounted to 41 military aircraft, including strategic bombers and other types of combat aircraft… as a result of the special operation of the Security Service of Ukraine on June 1, 2025.”