As the jet-fuel smoke and aircraft debris clear following Ukraine’s audacious drone attack on Russian airfields, Kyiv and Moscow have launched into a propaganda war about the extent of the damage.
While Russian claims that none of its planes were destroyed are demonstrably false, there are also questions around Ukraine’s own triumphant account of the success of its “Spiderweb” operation.
That tracks with a wider propaganda war being fought in parallel to the actual battlefield, with Russia making easily disprovable claims and Ukraine also seeking to shape the war narrative to its own advantage.
With the help of military experts, NBC News has analyzed satellite images taken by independent companies such as Planet Labs and Maxar, and determined that at least 10 planes were destroyed.
That concurs with an assessment by NATO.
The Western alliance agrees with Ukraine that around 40 aircraft were damaged, but says that only “10 to 13 aircraft were completely destroyed,” according to a senior NATO official, speaking on condition of anonymity to journalists at the margins of a Thursday meeting of defense ministers in Brussels.
That’s only half as many aircraft as Ukraine claimed to have destroyed.
Oliver Alexander, a Danish open-source intelligence analyst, told NBC News that the publicly available evidence best supports this version of events.
“Right now, the number coming from NATO officials is the one that lines up most accurately with what can be observed from high-resolution satellite imagery and the videos released by the SBU,” he said, referring to Ukraine’s SBU intelligence service.
The satellite images and SBU footage show 12 aircraft “completely destroyed” and another 10 “hit” by the drones, according to Alexander.
“Though they did not burn, so assessing the level of damage from satellite imagery is hard or impossible,” he added. “If more were hit” — as Ukraine says is the case — “we are missing video evidence of around 15 hits,” he said.
Satellite imagery from Planet Labs and Maxar taken 2,500 miles away from Ukraine, in Russia’s Irkutsk oblast, on June 5, four days after the attack, showed six aircraft at Belaya airfield that were completely destroyed in the Ukrainian attack.
Three were Tupolev Tu-95 strategic bombers, and three Tupolev Tu-22 supersonic bombers, all of which have been used to launch missiles at Ukraine.
At Olenya air base, 1,200 miles from Ukraine in Russia’s far north, fresh burn marks and rubble where planes had previously been parked were visible in satellite images taken the same day. They suggest that Ukraine had destroyed at least four Russian aircraft.
The images confirm that at least two were Tu-95s and another was a Tu-22. Social media video geolocated by NBC News to Olenya air base shows a man dressed in military fatigues filming a wall of flames also around a Tu-95 bomber.
While Ukraine released what it said were recordings of drones attacking these air bases, as well as two others in the Ivanovo and Ryazan regions, satellite imagery did not show any visible signs of damage at these sites.
Russia no longer manufactures these aircraft, said Thomas Withington, an electronic warfare and air defense expert at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank in London.
“You can’t just go to the factory and get a new one. Once you lose one of these aircraft, broadly speaking you lose it forever,” said Withington. “That degrades the strategic and nuclear capabilities of the Russian air force.”
Whatever the total losses, few outside Russia contest that Ukraine’s operation was a remarkable feat of intelligence, planning and utilizing cheap, modern warfare tools.
According to the SBU, it stashed 117 small drones inside sheds on the backs of trucks, unleashing them near the perimeters of four Russian air bases. One of these air bases, Belaya, is 2,500 miles away from Ukraine’s borders.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy hailed it as “a brilliant result” that took 18 months to plan and would “undoubtedly be in history books.”
Zelenskyy aide Pavlo Palisa told journalists in Washington on Wednesday that 41 Russian aircraft were hit, around half of which were “completely destroyed” and the rest no longer able to fly.
The SBU and Zelenskyy said 34% of Russia’s nuclear-capable strategic bombing force had been taken out of action — at a cost of $7 billion.
Palisa told reporters that two Beriev A-50s — rare and valuable early-warning radar planes, known as “awacs” — were “targeted.” The SBU’s video only appeared to show a drone landing on top of the radar dish of one of these aircraft, however, with no explosion.
When contacted by NBC News for more information on how it came to its figures, the SBU said that NATO confirmed its tally — despite the discrepancy in figures given by the alliance.
Russia has a far different version of events.
Deputy Defense Minister Sergei Ryabkov told the TASS state-run news agency that the planes were “not destroyed, but damaged,” and that they “will be restored.”
He said there was “nothing even close” to Ukraine’s figure of 41.
The Russian Ministry of Defense called it “a terrorist attack” and said it had been “repelled.” Some “aircraft caught fire” but “the fires have been extinguished,” it added.
Pro-Kremlin commentator Sergei Markov said that while it was a “strong” strike, it “will have no military significance.” He put the losses at eight aircraft, only half of which were bombers, without elaborating on how he reached that number.
“Aren’t the Ukrainian Armed Forces lying all the time, exaggerating Russia’s losses?” he wrote on Telegram. “And here they are greatly exaggerating.”
