Caught in the web. The unsuspecting truckers at the heart of Ukraine’s daring “Operation Spiderweb” drone attack against Russian military airfields

Mikhail Ryumin, a 55-year-old trucker, was dozing in the cab of his parked truck on the side of the road when a sudden jolt and a loud bang startled him awake. The first thing he saw was a frightened rat scurrying around the cabin, recounts his wife, Galina Ryumina.

“He thought the rat had caused all of it,” she recalls anxiously. “Then he looked up and… my God, it was drones!”

Around 1 p.m. on June 1, 2025, several drones flew out from under the roofs of the prefabricated houses Ryumin was transporting in a rented truck from Chelyabinsk close to the Ural Mountains to the Ivanovo region close to Moscow, about a thousand miles to the west. The drones attacked an airfield in Ivanovo, home to Russia’s rarest “flying radar” A-50 aircraft. At roughly the same time, reports of drone sightings and fires at military airbases began to surface from other Russian regions, with Olenya airbase in the Murmansk (in the Russian North), Belaya airbase in Irkutsk region (Siberia), and Dyagilevo airbase in Ryazan region (central Russia) all ablaze.

A couple of hours later, news emerged of a truck that had burned down on a highway near the village of Seryshevo in the Amur region, deep in the Russian Far East. During unloading, something in its semi-trailer exploded, and “parts of the vehicle were scattered on both sides of the road and further down the carriageway,” wrote the publication Amurskaya Pravda. Later that night, the region’s governor, Vasily Orlov, reported that the driver had been injured in the trailer “fire.”

This was Operation “Spiderweb,” a Ukrainian military intelligence mission that had been “more than a year and a half” in the making, according to Ukrainian media. The Washington Post reported that preparations were overseen personally by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He later told ABC News that the truck drivers were unaware of their hidden cargo.

According to the Economist, around 150 drones and 300 explosive devices were initially smuggled into Russia.

The SBU reported that the attack on the four Russian airbases damaged 41 Russian military aircraft, including A-50, Tu-95, Tu-22M3, and Tu-160 planes. NATO estimated that between 10 and 13 Russian aircraft were completely destroyed in the operation.

The Russian Ministry of Defence acknowledged the drone attack on the airfields. In a statement, the ministry said that in the Murmansk and Irkutsk regions, “several units of aviation equipment caught fire,” while in the Ivanovo, Ryazan, and Amur regions, “all terrorist attacks were repelled.” The ministry also added that “there were no casualties among military personnel or civilian staff,” and that “some participants in the terrorist attacks have been detained.”

On June 2, the publication Astra published the names of four detained truck drivers who had been transporting the prefabricated houses with the hidden drones, without citing a source. Mediazona has managed to establish the men’s identities—at least two of them face charges of committing a terrorist act as part of a group—and confirm their arrests, as well as the death of another driver.

Vasily Pytikov, 62. Died in Amur region

The SBU had initially planned to attack five Russian military airfields, but the operation in the Amur region was thwarted when the truck carrying drones intended for the Ukrainka base caught fire on the highway.

The driver was Vasily Pytikov, a trucker from Chelyabinsk, explained his colleague, Viktor. The Mediazona source also knows Mikhail Ryumin, another truck driver accused of involvement in the June 1 airfield attack.

About ten years ago, Viktor and Pytikov worked together at Chelyabtransavto company and had kept in touch.

“Vasya’s birthday is May 31, I spoke to him then,” he says. “He was stopped, 600 kilometres from Blagoveshchensk, broken down—the truck had broken down. He said they’d found a good job. ‘We’re working, hauling cabins’.”

“Cabins” is what truckers usually call the components of modular buildings, Viktor clarifies. “I hauled the same kind of thing for almost eight years, all over the country. If they’d given me a cabin like that, I’d have loaded it up and driven it just the same. You can’t even get inside—ours were all sealed up. You’re not going to start taking the walls apart, are you?”

In one of three videos published on June 1 by a pro-war blogger Kirill Fedorov, a truck is parked on the side of the road, smoke billowing from it, as ten men rush around nearby. At one point, another man in a sports jacket, holding something red, enters the trailer, after which an explosion is heard and the video cuts out. The Mediazona source recognised his friend in the footage.

“Since he opened the door—was he going in to put out the fire? What was he doing in there? With a fire extinguisher?” he wonders.

Pytikov lived alone; his wife died from Covid three years ago. The driver’s friend is certain that he would never have agreed to the job if he had known what cargo he was to deliver.

“Vasya was such a patriot his whole life. The idea that he’d know and still transport it—yeah, right!” Viktor scoffs.

The person who filmed another video published by Fedorov can be heard saying that “spare parts and aluminium” were scattered around the explosion site. “Basically, the roadside caught fire, the firefighters are here… And the guy—there’s a corpse lying there, fuck,” he comments on what he sees. Then he adds: “Right at this little crossroads, there’s a burned-up guy, damn it.”

Pytikov’s body was not released to his relatives for three weeks, his colleague continues. A memorial service was held in Chelyabinsk on June 22, after which Vasily was cremated, and his ashes were interred on June 27.

Mikhail Ryumin, 55. Detained in Ivanovo region

The deceased Pytikov knew Mikhail Ryumin, the 55-year-old driver detained in the Ivanovo region, from whose truck drones also suddenly began to emerge on June 1. The men had started their new jobs together after hearing about the opportunity from someone at a truck stop. The drivers had been facing “some difficulties” at their old jobs, says their colleague Viktor.

“It’s terrifying to imagine something like this happening: you’re nearly 60 and you get thrown in prison for nothing…” he says, upset.

As reported by pro-security services Telegram channels Baza and Mash, the trucks used in the operation belonged to a man named Artem Timofeev. On June 2, authorities in the Irkutsk region published a wanted notice for a 37-year-old Ukrainian native with that name who was “possibly involved” in the attack, though the post was later deleted.

Kommersant wrote that on June 5, a file in Timofeev’s name appeared in the Interior Ministry’s wanted database. Two days later, his wife, Yulia Timofeeva, was also declared wanted, TASS claimed. According to the state agency, both spouses were born in Ukraine and left Russia for Kazakhstan at the end of May.

“This was their first run [at the new job],” says the Mediazona source about Ryumin and Pytikov. “They got used trucks, their boss… Artem or whatever his name is… Well, they were fixing those trucks up, he was paying them a salary, they were happy… The salary’s being paid—we’re fixing the trucks, soon the work will start—we’ll get to work.”

Ryumin’s wife, Galina, told Mediazona that for two months before their first trip, her husband and Vasily Pytikov had been repairing the trucks they were given, “taking them to the service centre,” while their employer paid them “in instalments of 50,000 roubles a month” (about $600).

Despite this, Ryumin’s truck also broke down on the road, says Galina. “He broke down, Pytikov broke down. My husband was fuming: ‘I don’t know,’ he says, ‘I’ve been under the truck, done everything—it just keeps flashing.’ He was fixing it, just sitting there. He said: ‘That’s it, I don’t need this kind of work, the truck is a wreck, it’s useless. I’ll go work on rotation, to hell with this.’”

The couple has been together for over 30 years. Galina always packed her husband’s things for his trips and “saw that little house” that Mikhail was supposed to transport from Chelyabinsk to the Ivanovo region. She does not know who the client was.

“It was an ordinary job, nothing special,” the woman muses. “The travel documents, everything was in order.”

When the truck broke down on the road, Ryumin called his employer, Galina recounts. “He tried to get through to this Artem—he needed some money brought over to fix the truck. But the guy said he was in China. ‘I can’t,’ he says, ‘I’ll be back soon, we’ll figure it out.’ And he [Ryumin] goes: ‘So I’m just supposed to sit here, then?’ ”

Her husband contacted her right after he noticed the drones flying out of his trailer, Galina Ryumina recalls.

“He managed to call me: ‘Drones—from my truck!’” she almost shouts into the phone. “So I told him: ‘Call, call the police, call 112.’ It was a shock, he was in shock!”

FSB officers who arrived on the scene detained the driver. He was soon charged with terrorism committed by a group. Two weeks later, investigators came to the Ryumins’ home in Chelyabinsk with a search warrant but seized nothing.

“We don’t have anything, not even computers at home,” says Galina, who was later summoned for questioning. “A young girl, an investigator. I ask her: ‘How long do we have to endure this, how long do we have to wait?’ She says: ‘Two months—and they’ll release him.’”

In August, the Ivanovo Regional Court extended Mikhail Ryumin’s detention until the end of November. He has been in pre-trial detention for over three months. His state-appointed lawyer, Alexander Pankratov, did not respond to our questions. According to Galina, her husband’s defender is “a rather boorish fellow” who speaks to them disrespectfully.

“The lawyer called, spoke rudely: ‘He’s facing from ten years to life. Are you aware that he’s in a pre-trial detention centre?’ He says no one will take on this case. Then my daughter called the lawyer, she had a fit.”

Galina Ryumina attended Vasily Pytikov’s farewell ceremony in June. She says that her husband’s colleague’s body was severely burned, and his face was covered with a “wax mask,” which made the man in the coffin seem like a stranger to her.

Ryumina is convinced of her husband’s innocence, just as she is sure he could not have been involved with the Ukrainian intelligence. “Pioneer, Komsomol—that’s how we lived,” she laments. “When the war started, we were worried, we cried. Friends of ours, young boys, died, we went to their funerals. We knew a person—and now he’s gone. He [Ryumin] wanted to go and fight too, I said ‘no.’ Because our daughter is here, she needs help. And his health isn’t the best. I said, where would you go?”

Her husband calls her occasionally from the detention centre. “He calls and asks: how are the dogs, how’s our granddaughter?” Galina sobs. “He adores his dogs. He says, please, don’t give them away to anyone, I’ll be back.”

Ryumin’s colleague Viktor has no contact with him, but he says that he and other drivers from Chelyabinsk are “worried about Misha.” They do not know the details of the case.

“You know how our investigative bodies work: first they’ll beat your kidneys out, and then you’ll confess to everything yourself,” the trucker says.

Andrey Merkuryev, 61. Detained in Irkutsk region

On June 1, the channel Babr Mash published a video of the start of the drone attack in the Irkutsk region. The footage shows drones flying out of a truck parked by a highway, with the detached roof of the semi-trailer lying on the ground nearby. The person filming comments on the events: “There it is, another copter just took off! No idea where they’re launching from! There it is, the clown, damn it! Out of nowhere, the bastard! Whoa! What the hell, damn it! Holy shit, look what tech can do now!” The context of subsequent videos on the channel makes it clear that the truck driver is not the one filming—he was quickly detained. According to the channel, truckers at the rest stop collectively tried to throw stones at the drones emerging from the trailer.

At the wheel of the truck that day was 61-year-old Andrei Merkuryev from Chelyabinsk. The driver’s ex-wife did not directly confirm his arrest but told Mediazona that she had received calls from “investigators, from the FSB.” According to Maya Merkuryeva, she and Andrey divorced several years ago, and she is “not interested” in his detention.

“I don’t know what happened, but honestly, I’m not even interested in what happened,” she says. “Well, a lawyer called my daughter, asking for some kind of help. But I’m not prepared to help anyone in any way.”

Merkuryev reached out to his daughter through his lawyer, even though she “hadn’t seen him for two years,” says Maya.

“The lawyer said he’s asking our daughter for forgiveness for this situation,” Merkuryeva says with irritation. “It might be different if she had any contact with him, but there was no contact, not even by phone.”

According to her, his lawyer “played on their pity,” suggesting they help Merkuryev with “money, belongings, medicine,” because “his mother is elderly.” But Merkuryeva and her daughter refused. The driver’s daughter also declined to answer Mediazona’s questions or provide her father’s lawyer’s contact information.

According to leaked databases, Merkuryev was born in Uzbekistan in 1963. He and Maya Merkuryeva have two children, a daughter and a son. The woman told Mediazona that she moved from Chelyabinsk to Moscow several years ago and does not know who her husband’s social circle was.

In 2008, he was tried for making death threats and causing bodily harm to a woman.

“I remember that situation, but I don’t remember the sentence,” says his ex-wife. “I remember there was some kind of fine.”

Alexander Zaytsev, 56. Detained in Murmansk region

Judging by data from phonebooks collected by the GetContact service, as well as other leaked databases, 56-year-old Alexander Zaytsev from Chelyabinsk worked as a taxi driver and at the Serov Ferroalloys Plant several years ago, before becoming a private entrepreneur. His trucking company closed in the summer of 2024.

His Instagram profile picture shows a broad-shouldered man in a striped T-shirt holding a garden hose and smiling widely at the camera, flanked by his two laughing daughters.

On June 25, 2025, the Murmansk Regional Court upheld the detention of “defendant Z.” in a criminal case initiated on June 1, 2025, “regarding the commission of a terrorist act by an organised group on the territory of the Murmansk region,” Mediazona discovered. According to the case file on the court’s website, the defendant was initially ordered to be held for two months by the Olenegorsk City Court on June 3. The date of arrest and the court’s jurisdiction suggest that the case involves Alexander Zaytsev. Furthermore, the appeal ruling states that the defendant worked as a driver before his arrest.

Zaytsev’s wife did not directly confirm her husband’s arrest but mentioned that Alexander is “no longer in the Olenegorsk pre-trial detention centre.” She said she doubted that speaking to journalists could help her in any way.

State-appointed lawyer Tatyana Ionova confirmed to Mediazona that she had previously represented Zaytsev’s interests but declined to answer any further questions.

Sergey Kanurin, 47. Detained in Ryazan region

According to Astra, the fourth detained driver was 47-year-old Sergey Kanurin. Leaked databases show that seven years ago, the man worked as a taxi driver; his social media is filled with photos and videos from his long-haul trucking journeys.

In September 1999, Kanurin was put on a wanted list for abandoning his military unit in Volgograd without leave. In recent years, he also had several debts with the Federal Bailiff Service.

Judging by leaked databases, Sergey Kanurin and Alexander Zaytsev were acquainted: thanks to call records, it can be traced that the men called each other at least in May 2024. Both drivers also follow each other on Instagram.

The detainee’s wife, Anastasia Kanurina, did not respond to messages and calls for several months. In early September—likely after her husband’s detention was extended—she finally agreed to a call. However, on the appointed day, Anastasia blocked the Mediazona reporter.

Mediazona sent letters to all the detained drivers at their respective pre-trial detention facilities, but has not received any replies.

Editor: Maria Klimova