ESSAY: Alpha SBU, 32 Years of Secret War — 649 Russian Air Defence Systems Destroyed

Introduction: An Anniversary Counted in Ruins of the Russian Army

23 June and the accounting of resistance

On 23 June 2026, the Alpha Special Operations Centre of the SBU — Ukraine's Security Service — celebrated its 32nd anniversary. In another country, another context, such an anniversary would have been an institutional formality, a troop review, perhaps a medal pinned on a lapel. In Ukraine, in 2026, after four years of total war, this date has become a wartime balance sheet of staggering accounting precision.

The figures published by UNN on this occasion are those of a total war waged with limited means against a great power's army. 1,896 tanks destroyed. 3,458 armoured fighting vehicles put out of action. 649 Russian air defence systems neutralised. 540 electronic warfare and reconnaissance systems destroyed. 23,517 Russian drones and robotic ground vehicles destroyed. These figures do not fall from the sky: they are the product of four years of special operations, human intelligence, sabotage and coordinated strikes.

Operation "Spider Web": 41 aircraft for 7 billion USD in damages

Among all of SBU Alpha's operations, Operation Spider Web stands out as the most spectacular in strategic terms. According to the same UNN data, this single operation struck 41 Russian military aircraft, causing estimated damages of more than 7 billion USD. For an intelligence agency that does not have an equivalent air force, destroying 41 aircraft without direct aerial combat is an achievement that illustrates the sophistication of Ukrainian operations.

This operation — whose tactical details remain partially classified — likely combined long-range drones, human intelligence infiltrated near Russian airfields, and coordination with Ukrainian electronic warfare capabilities. The result illustrates a truth that this essay seeks to explore: Ukrainian special operations have changed in nature over the course of this war, evolving from classical resistance to a sophisticated strategic strike capability.

Understanding SBU Alpha: A Unit Born in Turmoil

32 years of history between Soviet legacy and Ukrainian identity

The Alpha Special Operations Centre of the SBU was born in 1994, at the moment when post-Soviet Ukraine was beginning to build its own security institutions from the ruins of the Ukrainian KGB. This hybrid origin — inheriting Soviet structures while reorienting them toward democratic objectives — long defined the internal ambiguities and tensions of the SBU. The total war of 2022–2026 put an end to these ambiguities: the SBU chose its side with absolute clarity.

This was not a foregone conclusion. In 2022, during the first weeks of the invasion, certain elements of the SBU were compromised by Russian infiltration — a problem the agency confronted publicly, with arrests and internal purges. Four years later, the tally of 23,517 Russian drones and vehicles destroyed says that the purge worked and that the unit has recovered its operational coherence.

From counter-espionage to deep strike

The operational evolution of SBU Alpha since 2022 is itself a subject for this essay. At the start of the war, the unit focused primarily on counter-espionage, securing Ukrainian leaders and neutralising Russian saboteur networks. Progressively, its capabilities evolved toward increasingly ambitious offensive operations — culminating in Spider Web and strikes on installations thousands of kilometres from the front.

This evolution is not trivial: it reflects the transformation of the entire Ukrainian army since 2022, moving from a territorial defence force to an army capable of projecting power deep into enemy territory. SBU Alpha is the sharpest point of this transformation. Its 649 air defence systems destroyed are the 649 Russian anti-air eyes and arms that will never again see or intercept a Ukrainian aircraft or drone.

649 Air Defence Systems Destroyed: What It Really Means

The invisible battle for air superiority

The destruction of 649 Russian air defence systems is one of the least-reported but most strategically significant aspects of the war in Ukraine. Air superiority — or its absence — fundamentally determines the outcome of modern conflicts. Russia invested massively in its air defence systems (S-300, S-400, Pantsir, Tor) to create aerial exclusion bubbles that protect its ground forces and rear installations.

Each Russian air defence system neutralised is an aerial exclusion bubble that disappears. This is not merely a tactical victory: it is a measurable reduction in Russia's ability to protect its ground troops, its logistics convoys and its military installations against airstrikes and drones. Accumulated over four years, the 649 systems represent a significant structural degradation of Russia's air defence posture.

Complementarity with the long-range strike campaign

The destruction of Russian air defence systems by SBU Alpha is intrinsically linked to the Ukrainian long-range strike campaign. The Ukrainian drones striking factories in Voronezh, Orenburg or Dubna are able to reach them in part because the Russian air defence systems in those areas have been progressively degraded. This is a remarkable operational coordination: SBU Alpha prepares the ground for deep strikes by blinding and disarming Russian defences.

This operational synergy also explains why Russia struggles to respond effectively to Ukrainian strikes on its own territory. Russian air defence, solicited across its entire immense territory, dispersed, and progressively degraded by four years of Ukrainian special operations, can no longer guarantee reliable protection even of the most strategic installations. That is the result of 649 destructions, one by one, methodically.

23,517 Russian Drones Destroyed: Robotic Warfare Is Here

The dronisation of the battlefield and its implications

The figure of 23,517 Russian drones and robotic ground vehicles destroyed since the start of the war — a statistic drawn from SBU Alpha's tally — is a window onto the transformation of the contemporary battlefield. The war in Ukraine has become the world's laboratory for large-scale drone warfare: thousands of vectors deployed daily, on both sides, for reconnaissance, attack, munition delivery and jamming.

Destroying more than 23,000 Russian drones means neutralising as many eyes and strike vectors as Russia had sent against Ukrainian positions. Every drone downed potentially means a Ukrainian tank it did not guide to destruction, an artillery position it did not geolocate, a supply corridor it did not monitor. Drone warfare is a high-intensity war that runs continuously, without pause, without a night's respite.

The SBU and the FBI: the war of digital networks

On 25 June 2026, UNN reported a joint SBU-FBI operation that exposed the hacking of messaging applications belonging to officials in Ukraine, the EU and the United States by Russian special services. This revelation illustrates a dimension often underestimated in the war: the information and digital intelligence war runs parallel to ground combat, with comparable stakes.

Russian services seek to infiltrate the communications of Ukrainian political and military leaders, their European partners, and American services — to anticipate strategic decisions, sow distrust among allies, and identify the key actors of support for Ukraine. The SBU-FBI cooperation in exposing and neutralising these hacking operations is a little-known but crucial aspect of Ukrainian resistance: it preserves the confidentiality of allied coordination that makes everything else possible.

Tracking Collaborators: 8 Arrests for Cheering Putin

The problem of the internal fifth column

According to Euromaidan Press on 23 June 2026, Ukraine arrested 8 people accused of cheering Russian strikes from inside the country and of passing information to Russian services. This arrest illustrates one of the most painful dimensions of the war: the internal fifth column, those Ukrainian citizens who, for ideological, economic or coerced reasons, actively collaborate with the enemy.

The SBU, in tracking these collaborators, is waging a difficult internal war that requires a delicate balance between national security and fundamental rights. It is easy, in wartime, to slide toward indiscriminate repression in the name of security. Ukraine, despite the pressure, has broadly maintained a legal framework for these arrests — a sign of democratic maturity that fundamentally distinguishes Kyiv from Moscow.

Human intelligence versus technical intelligence

The SBU Alpha tally illustrates sophisticated balancing between human intelligence (HUMINT) and technical intelligence (SIGINT). Major operations like Spider Web and the destructions of air defence systems require quality human intelligence — infiltrated sources, agents positioned near targets, contact networks in occupied areas. The digital war exposed with the FBI requires high-level SIGINT and cyber capabilities.

The fact that SBU Alpha could simultaneously conduct operations in Russian depth, secure allied communications and track internal collaborators — all over four years of total war — says something important about the institutional transformation of Ukrainian security. This agency is no longer the troubled heir of the Ukrainian KGB: it is a modern intelligence organisation, high-performing and rooted in its democratic values.

Spider Web as Doctrine: Lessons for the Armies of Tomorrow

41 aircraft without direct aerial combat: a new paradigm

Operation Spider Web — 41 Russian aircraft struck, 7 billion USD in damages — deserves thorough doctrinal analysis. It illustrates what military theorists now call "deep strike enablement by special operations": the capacity of special forces and intelligence to create the conditions for high-value strategic strikes that conventional forces could not achieve alone.

In the case of Spider Web, Russian aircraft were presumably struck at their airfields or at close range from take-off, in conditions where Russian air defence was not expecting a strike. This type of operation — exploiting vulnerability windows created by human intelligence — is the answer of asymmetric armies to conventional material superiority. And it delivers results that entire squadrons of fighters might not have achieved.

The lessons for Western alliances

Ukraine's allies — NATO, the United States, Europe — are watching the operational tally of SBU Alpha attentively. This data feeds in real time into Western military doctrines on drone warfare, deep special operations and intelligence-to-strike coordination. Ukraine has become, despite itself, the greatest war laboratory of the twenty-first century, and its lessons are being integrated into the training, exercises and doctrines of allied armies.

For the Western intelligence services that support Ukraine — in intelligence, training, equipment — the Alpha tally is also the justification for this investment. Every dollar spent on training Ukrainian operators, every technology shared, has had a force multiplier effect measured in 649 air defence systems and in 7 billion in damages to Russian aviation.

Alpha and Crimea: Special Operations on the Southern Flank

The Crimea strikes: a carefully calculated campaign

SBU Alpha's operations are not limited to major industrial deep strikes into Russian territory. They also include an intensive campaign in Crimea, documented by the SBU itself and by Gwara Media on 24 June 2026. Ukraine struck fuel depots, port facilities, air defence systems and communications nodes on the occupied peninsula. These strikes respond to a doctrine announced by Zelensky himself: Crimea is an active theatre of war, not a permanent territorial acquisition.

Crimea is the main logistics base of the Black Sea Fleet and a crucial transit point for Russian supplies to the occupied territories of southern Ukraine. Every strike on Crimea disrupts this logistics, forces Russia to spend additional resources defending the peninsula, and maintains psychological pressure on Russian forces that can never feel safe even far from the front. The Ukrainian strategy is to make Crimea too costly to defend — an attrition logic applied to a rear base.

The port of Kavkaz and the strikes on oil terminals

The strikes on the ports of Kerch and Kavkaz documented by the SSU and Militarnyi specifically targeted oil terminals and hydrocarbon storage tanks. These facilities serve both to supply fuel to Russian forces in Crimea and to transit Russian oil toward Mediterranean markets. Their destruction creates dual pressure: on Russian military logistics in Crimea and on the oil export flows that finance Moscow's war budget.

These strikes on the Kavkaz oil terminals are part of the same logic as the campaign against Russian refineries: Kyiv has understood that oil is the financial artery of the Russian war, and that attacking this artery — at the refinery, at the export port or on the tanker in the Mediterranean — is an economic warfare strategy perfectly consistent with its military objectives. Ukraine is fighting on all fronts simultaneously: human, industrial, logistical and financial.

International Cooperation in Ukrainian Intelligence

The SBU-FBI partnership and its geopolitical implications

The joint SBU-FBI operation revealed on 25 June 2026 that exposed the hacking of messaging applications by Russian special services is the symbol of an intelligence cooperation between Ukraine and its Western allies that now extends well beyond the traditional bilateral framework. The United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and other partners have provided intelligence data, collection technologies and training that have transformed the SBU into a world-class agency over four years of total war.

This cooperation has an enormous multiplier effect. The intelligence resources of the Alliance combined with the intimate knowledge of terrain, languages, networks and actors that the SBU brings, creates a synergy that exceeds what either partner could achieve alone. The tally of 649 air defence systems destroyed and of operation Spider Web is in part the fruit of this cooperation.

The cyber war: a front as decisive as the terrain

The exposure of Russian hacking of officials' messaging apps in Ukraine, the EU and the United States reveals the scale of the cyber front of this war. Russia has invested massively in its cyber capabilities — its hacking groups affiliated with Russian military and civilian services are among the most sophisticated in the world. These groups are not merely seeking to spy — they seek to destabilise, to manipulate, to create distrust among allies and to steal information that can alter strategic decisions.

The SBU-FBI cooperation in exposing these operations is a victory on this invisible front. But it is a partial victory: revealing a hacking operation forces the adversary to rebuild its compromised networks, to change its methods. The cyber war never stops — it mutates. And the SBU, with its 540 Russian electronic warfare systems destroyed, has shown it can fight on this front with as much effectiveness as on others.

Conclusion: 32 Years of History for Ukrainian Freedom

A tally that goes beyond accounting

The tally of the 32nd anniversary of SBU Alpha Centre is far more than a military statistic. It is the portrait of an institution that grew with its country, that assumed its post-Soviet contradictions, that endured Russian infiltrations, that reformed itself, and that, in 2026, stands firm with objective operational results that command respect. The 1,896 tanks, 3,458 armoured vehicles, 649 air defence systems, 540 electronic warfare systems, 23,517 drones destroyed are the result of 32 years of existence and four years of total intensity.

But behind these figures are men and women who risked their lives, some of whom lost them, to allow Ukraine to resist the largest military aggression in Europe since the Second World War. The essay stops here, before this human reality that statistics cannot fully contain.

What SBU Alpha's anniversary says about Ukraine in 2026

A society capable, in the midst of total war, of commemorating 32 years of a security institution with verifiable and public data, is a society that has chosen democratic transparency even in extreme adversity. No authoritarian regime — neither Putin's Russia, nor Xi's China, nor the mullahs' Iran — publishes its war tallies with this level of detail and accountability. This single fact says more about the difference between Ukraine and its enemies than any diplomatic speech.

Signed Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency box

This article draws on the official communiqué published by UNN on 23 June 2026 on the occasion of the 32nd anniversary of SBU Alpha Centre. All figures (tanks, armoured vehicles, air defence systems, drones, Spider Web) come from this communiqué. Information on the SBU-FBI cooperation comes from UNN on 25 June 2026. The collaborator arrests are documented by Euromaidan Press on 23 June. Analyses from Gwara Media on 24 June complemented the documentation. No testimony was invented. The editorial passages are the columnist's opinions.

Sources

Primary sources

UNN: SBU Alpha 32nd anniversary unit — 23 June 2026

Gwara Media: UkraineSBU hits Russian air defense Crimea — 24 June 2026

SSU Main Page: SBU strikes Kavkaz seaport oil depot — 21 June 2026

Secondary sources

ISW: Ukrainian offensive campaign assessment June 21 — 22 June 2026

Euromaidan Press: Ukraine arrests eight people accused cheering Russian strikes — 23 June 2026

UNN: SBUFBI expose Russian hacking messengers — 25 June 2026