Kiev, Ukraine - Any description of Ukraine's attack on the Russian strategic bomber fleet could make a battle for the highest level.

Ukrainian authorities and intelligence personnel said forty aircraft — including supersonic TU-22M long-range bomber, TU-95 Flying Fortress and A-50 Early Warning Fighter — were attacked and damaged on four airports, including airports in the Arctic and Siberia.

Moscow did not comment on the damage to the plane, but confirmed that the airport was hit by a "Ukrainian terrorist attack."

The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) released a video plan and performing the operation, called SpiderWeb, shows only a few aircraft.

Strategic bombers have been used to launch ballistic and cruise missiles from Russian airspace to hit Ukraine’s targets, causing widespread damage and casualties.

The bomber fleet is one-third of the "Nuclear Triad" in Moscow, and the weapon also includes nuclear missiles and warships carrying missiles.

According to some observers, the attack broke Russia’s image as a global nuclear superpower.

The attack inadvertently “helps the West because it targets (Russia) nuclear energy,” Lt. General Ihor Romanenko, chief of staff of the Ukrainian military, told Al Jazeera.

He said that while the attack reduced Russia's potential to launch missiles in Ukraine, it would not affect ground-ground hostilities on the crescent-shaped 1,200-km (745-mile) frontline.

Romanenko compared the scope and creativity of the spider web with a series of attacks on the Russian Black Sea Fleet in 2023, which focused primarily on affiliated Crimea.

Although Ukrainian navy included a handful of decades of small warships that fit into football-sized ports, Kief reshaped naval warfare by hitting and flooding Russian warships and submarines with missiles, air and sea drones.

Moscow hurriedly moved the extinct Black Sea fleet eastward to the port of Novorossiysk, no longer using it to intercept Ukrainian civilian ships loaded with grain and steel.

The spider webs fell into the measures of Russian military strategists because they designed air defense measures to prevent missiles or heavier long-range strike drones.

Instead, the SBU uses 117 toy-like First Person View (FPV) drones, each for no hundreds of dollars, that are hidden in wooden crates on the truck.

Their unsuspecting drivers took them next to the airport - shocked to see them fly out and cause $7 billion in damages.

A Russian man said: "The driver was running around in panic.

Other videos released by SBU were shot by drones as they hit the plane, causing thunder explosions and black smoke from the sky.

The Russian air defense system guarding the airport is not designed to detect and hit small FPV drones, and radio barrier equipment may cause them to lose their routes or fail.

The SBU added a humiliating detail - the Spider Web Command Center is located in an undisclosed location in Russia, near the office of the Federal Security Services Agency (FSB), a major intelligence agency in Moscow, and Russian President Vladimir Putin once advanced.

"For Russia, FSB, Putin, it's a slap."

However, Kyiv does not specifically target the pillars of the Russian nuclear triad.

"They destroyed Russian Strategic Aviation not because it was able to carry missiles with nuclear warheads, but because it was used to launch … nuclear-free (missiles)." Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher at the University of Bremont in Germany, told Al Jazeera.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the operation took 18 months to plan and execute, hurting one-third of Russian strategic bombers.

"This is our deepest action. Ukraine's action will certainly be in the history textbook," he wrote in a telegram late Sunday. "We are doing everything we can to make Russia feel that it must end this war."

The Military Blog said on Monday that the SBU used artificial intelligence algorithms to train drones to identify Soviet-era aircraft by using aircraft displayed at the Aviation Museum in Central Ukraine.

"The logic of the negotiation process will not change"

The attack took place the day before Ukrainian and Russian diplomats convened in Istanbul to restore long-lasting peace talks.

But that won't affect the "logic" of the negotiations, Kyiv political analysts said.

“Emotionally, psychologically and politically, the action strengthens the Ukrainian negotiators’ stance,” Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Penta think tank, told Al Jazeera. “But the logic of the negotiation process will not change.”

"Both sides will (U.S. President) Donald Trump become the arbitrator, and those who leave the talks first will undermine their negotiating status with the United States," Fusenko said.

Again, the negotiations may show that as Russia wants to occupy more Ukrainian territory, and that Ukraine will not throw away towels.

"Russia wants to end Ukraine, we show that we will resist, we will not give up, we will not surrender," Fusenko said.

By Monday, analysts using satellite images confirmed that 13 aircraft - eight TU-95s, four Tu-22ms and one AN-12 - were destroyed or damaged.

"Stunning success in well-executed actions," wrote Chris Biggers, a Washington, D.C.-based military analyst, wrote on X.

Ukrainian analyst Oko Hora said five more aircraft were destroyed at the Murmansk base.

According to a photo released by the SBU, the spider web targets three other airports, two in the western region and one near the Russian Pacific coast.

But so far, it has been reported that there has been no damage on the airport or on the plane.

Russia is likely to react to spider webs with larger drone and missile strikes.

"I'm afraid they'll use Oreshnik again," Fisenko said, referring to Russia's most advanced ballistic missile, which could speed up 12,300 kilometers per hour (7,610 miles per hour) or 10 times the speed of sound, and went on strike in Eastern Ukraine in November.