Hello and welcome to News Hour from the BBC World Service.

We're coming to you live from London. I'm James Menendez.

They say necessity is the mother of invention.

Ukraine doesn't have the same huge arsenal of missiles, fighters and bombers as its enemy Russia.

But it does, it seems on the evidence today,

have ingenuity, daring and a great deal of patience. We're told by Ukraine's president,

Vladimir Zelensky, that Operation Spidersweb was just over a year and a half in the planning.

An elaborate scheme to smuggle more than a hundred drones deep into

the vast expanse of Russia to launch at its fleet of strategic bombers.

And all the evidence suggests it worked.

The BBC's Paul Adams is in Kiev.

He's been telling me what was hit and where.

I mean, it's extraordinary the scope of it, from one end of Russia to the other, from the Arctic Circle to Siberia.

At least four air bases have been hit, at least two of them thousands of kilometers away from Ukraine's borders.

And air bases where some of Russia's key strategic bombers are located.

And I mean, the videos showing these attacks are truly breathtaking.

You see drones, tiny little drones, homing in on these vast bombers and sort of picking

them off one by one as they sit on the tarmac.

And when you start to delve into how this was conducted, it just gets more and more extraordinary. I mean, it sort of bears

comparison in some ways with the Israeli attack on Hezbollah using exploding pages in Lebanon last

summer. We're told that dozens of drones were smuggled into Russia.

They were loaded aboard pallets that were then installed on a number of large transporter trucks.

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