As good a reason as any to keep an eye on trucks and their drivers. Omniviolence after the jump.*
From The Wall Street Journal, December 9, 2025:
Kyiv’s plan to smuggle more than 100 drones into enemy territory required meticulous planning, high-tech gadgets—and luck
....MUCH MORE‘It’s not enough’ KYIV, Ukraine—One of the most audacious covert operations in modern warfare almost fell apart when a Russian truck driver placed a panicked call to the Ukrainian who had hired him.
The roof of the pre-fabricated cabin on the back of his truck had slid off, the driver said, revealing an unexpected and illicit cargo. “This is some kind of bulls—,” the driver told the transport manager, Artem Tymofeyev. “There are drones under the roof.”
“What the f—?” replied Tymofeyev, feigning ignorance.
In fact, the drones were part of a clandestine operation planned by the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, targeting Russia’s massive bomber fleet, which was terrorizing Ukrainian cities. Tymofeyev, a 37-year-old Ukrainian based in Russia, was the main on-the-ground coordinator.
Back in Kyiv, the operation’s planners were sweating, according to people involved in it. What if the trucker couldn’t get the roof back on? What if Russian security services were watching him? What if he told his wife, and she told friends?
They came up with a just-about-plausible explanation to relay back to the driver: The cabins were hunting lodges with drones used for tracking animals across large areas.
The driver soon texted Tymofeyev with a photo of the roof placed back atop the cabin and a single word: “Closed.” Operation Spiderweb was back on.
Five days later, on the morning of June 1, more than 100 drones emerged from cabins on the back of four trucks and swooped toward four Russian airfields. For the drone pilots hundreds of miles away in Kyiv, the defenseless warplanes were like fish in a barrel. An hour later, dozens of Russian warplanes had been destroyed or damaged.
The operation elevated the global standing of the SBU, long maligned as a corrupt successor of the Soviet KGB shot through with traitors. Lt. Gen. Vasyl Maliuk, a gruff and muscular career security officer, took charge of the agency soon after Russia invaded in 2022. He went on to reinvent it, winning acclaim for innovative operations such as blowing up Russia’s Kerch Bridge to Crimea with a truck bomb and killing a Russian general with an exploding scooter.
Spiderweb was the SBU’s most ambitious operation yet, and this account is the first to detail its planning and execution. Pulling it off required 18 months of meticulous planning, daring subterfuge, high-tech gadgets, cool nerves—and a dollop of luck.
It was fall 2023 when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called Maliuk into his office. Russia was targeting Ukrainian cities with missiles fired from warplanes beyond the range of Ukraine’s air-defense systems. Kyiv was strapped for interceptors to shoot down the missiles. So Zelensky instructed Maliuk to target the planes on the ground.The SBU had started using long-range drones, but they had limited range, accuracy and explosive power, and were vulnerable to Russian air defenses.
The operation would need to be launched from inside Russia. A hastily drawn-up plan envisaged smuggling a handful of drones into Russia through a network of agents and launching them from concealed locations near an airfield, such as long grass, according to the people involved in the operation. But the damage to Russia’s bomber fleet, one of the world’s largest, would be minimal.
“It’s not enough, damn it,” an SBU planner recalled thinking.
They would need to go bigger. That meant a more complex operation that would deliver more drones to several airfields. But they needed a Trojan Horse to bear them.
The SBU planner had an idea: Pre-fabricated cabins the size of shipping containers, transported on the back of trucks, could serve as launchpads for the drones. A dash of electrical and design wizardry created custom locks for the roofs, which were constructed to slide open when triggered remotely. The houses were equipped with batteries and solar panels to maintain communications with Ukraine and keep the drones charged.
The drones themselves were a more straightforward challenge. The SBU needed a bespoke machine of the kind that Ukraine’s war industry, which is at the forefront of drone technology, was well placed to produce. The device that emerged was a quadcopter about the size of a large dinner plate, with four rotors that could carry four pounds of explosives that would detonate on impact. The explosive mixture was tailor-made to penetrate the aircrafts’ outer layers and cause the fuel in their tanks to ignite.
The drones were designed to fly autonomously toward the target airport, where a pilot in Kyiv would take over control using connection via local cell towers, guided by a feed from a camera on the drone.
To prepare for the operation, the SBU brought in some of their best drone pilots to train on the machines, flying all day long to develop muscle memory. They weren’t told what they’d be targeting, leading some of them to grumble about being pulled off the front line.
Only a handful of people knew the full details of the operation, preventing details from leaking.
“The cabin manufacturers didn’t know that they would go near the airports, and the drone makers didn’t know that they would fly at these specific planes,” Maliuk said in emailed comments.
Next, the drones and cabins needed to be moved covertly into Russia. That’s where another of the SBU’s functions came in handy. In its efforts to combat contraband, the agency had learned how smugglers moved goods across the border, taking advantage of corruption in the ranks of Russian customs authorities. This time, though, the SBU was the smuggler. The drones were broken down into parts to be assembled later. The cabins had documents that falsely identified their provenance.
Once the equipment was in Russia, the SBU needed someone who could be trusted to reassemble it meticulously and coordinate its dispatch toward airfields in far-flung corners of Russia. A map of the routes with arrows arching across the country gave the operation its arachnid moniker.
They couldn’t use a dupe or someone of questionable reliability for an operation of this magnitude. So they turned to a former DJ and his tattoo-artist wife.
The couple
There was little to suggest what Artem Tymofeyev and his wife, Kateryna Tymofeyeva, were really up to in a nondescript warehouse in the industrial Russian city of Chelyabinsk this spring.Artem, who sported a bushy goatee and used to spin discs in Kyiv clubs, had moved to Chelyabinsk in 2018 on an invitation to go into business with his father, who ran a flour mill there. Kateryna, whose social-media pages are lined with pouty photographs, worked as a tattoo artist.
The Tymofeyevs had taken part in street protests in Kyiv in 2014 that ousted a pro-Russian president. But Moscow’s subsequent annexation of Crimea and covert invasion of eastern Ukraine tanked its neighbor’s economy, and the couple joined a Ukrainian diaspora in Russia numbering millions. These Ukrainians are largely indistinguishable from the natives due to their cultural similarities, including fluent Russian.
For the SBU, the Tymofeyevs ticked all the boxes. But the agency had to be sure, so it brought them to Lviv in western Ukraine for a lie-detector test. Convinced of their loyalty, the SBU placed them at the heart of the operation. The couple lived and breathed their mission, quickly learning how to assemble the drones and the cabins.
When they returned to Russia, they were questioned at the border by officers from the Federal Security Service, the FSB. The couple had Russian passports, but their place of birth was listed as Ukraine, drawing suspicion. After three hours, they were allowed through.
Back in Chelyabinsk, Artem set up a logistics company and rented a large warehouse and office in an industrial part of the city not far from the FSB’s local field office.
Tymofeyev set about buying trucks and hiring drivers. He placed an ad on a Russian website and interviewed more than 20 candidates. The drivers needed to be reliable but not inquisitive, passing not only Tymofeyev’s screening but also, secretly, the SBU’s, which included checks for any links to Russian law-enforcement agencies.
Kateryna kept inking while she helped out on the operation. As the equipment began to arrive, the couple spent hours in the warehouse assembling 150 drones and eight cabins under guidance by phone and video calls from Ukraine.
The drones took about a week, but the cabins were more awkward to put together. The roof of one kept coming off its delicate hinges. They remounted it under instructions from their SBU handlers.
By late April, everything was ready. The SBU wanted to strike its blow around Russian Victory Day on May 9, a day celebrated with fervent military pomp. But the operation ran into an unexpected issue: Excessive liquor consumption laid low several drivers over an extended holiday period for Orthodox Easter, Labor Day and Victory Day....
*From here things only get more horrific.
2019's - "Omniviolence Is Coming and the World Isn’t Ready"
....The political scientist Daniel Deudney has a word for what can result: “omniviolence.” The ratio of killers to killed, or “K/K ratio,” is falling. For example, computer scientist Stuart Russell has vividly described how a small group of malicious agents might engage in omniviolence: “A very, very small quadcopter, one inch in diameter can carry a one-or two-gram shaped charge,” he says.
“You can order them from a drone manufacturer in China. You can program the code to say: ‘Here are thousands of photographs of the kinds of things I want to target.’ A one-gram shaped charge can punch a hole in nine millimeters of steel, so presumably you can also punch a hole in someone’s head. You can fit about three million of those in a semi-tractor-trailer. You can drive up I-95 with three trucks and have 10 million weapons attacking New York City. They don’t have to be very effective, only 5 or 10% of them have to find the target.” Manufacturers will be producing millions of these drones, available for purchase just as with guns now, Russell points out, “except millions of guns don’t matter unless you have a million soldiers. You need only three guys to write the program and launch.” In this scenario, the K/K ratio could be perhaps 3/1,000,000, assuming a 10-percent accuracy and only a single one-gram shaped charge per drone....
two from 2021:
"Meet the future weapon of mass destruction, the drone swarm"
From The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists....
"Autonomous 'Slaughterbot' Drones Reportedly Attack Libyans Using Facial Recognition Tech"
and 2022's "The US Navy wants swarms of thousands of small drones"
April 2025 - Islamic Terrorists Are Now Attacking With Drones In Nigeria
