Re: The long-read articles thread.
93Maybe not that long - but a fine read. Book sounds worth tracking down…
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyl ... zils-roads
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyl ... zils-roads
Re: The long-read articles thread.
94Oh that's a fine bit of work. Thanks for that.Iancee wrote: Tue Dec 10, 2024 3:37 am Maybe not that long - but a fine read. Book sounds worth tracking down…
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyl ... zils-roads
at war with bellends
Re: The Secret Campaign in China to Save a Woman Chained by the Neck
96Three years ago, a video blogger stumbled on a shack in a tiny village in rural China.
Inside, stood a woman. She was dazed, shivering — and chained by the neck.
The video set off the biggest online uproar in China in years. People mobilized both online and offline to demand accountability.
Then, those voices disappeared.
by Vivian Wang, NY times
March 5, 2025
The video blogger had visited Dongji Village, in eastern China, to find a man known for raising eight children despite deep poverty. The man had become a favorite interview subject for influencers looking to attract donations and clicks.
But that day, one of the children led the blogger to someone not featured in many other videos: the child’s mother.
She stood in a doorless shack in the family’s courtyard, on a strip of dirt floor between a bed and a brick wall. She wore a thin sweater despite the January cold. When the blogger asked if she could understand him, she shook her head. A chain around her neck shackled her to the wall.
The video quickly spread online, and immediately, Chinese commenters wondered whether the woman had been sold to the man in Dongji and forced to have his children — a kind of trafficking that is a longstanding problem in China’s countryside. They demanded the government intervene.
Instead, local officials issued a short statement brushing off the concerns: The woman was legally married to the man and had not been trafficked. She was chained up because she was mentally ill and sometimes hit people.
Public outrage only grew. People wrote blog posts demanding to know why women could be treated like animals. Others printed fliers or visited the village to investigate for themselves. This was about more than trafficking, people said. It was another reason many young women were reluctant to get married or have children, because the government treated marriage as a license to abuse.
The outcry rippled nationwide for weeks. Many observers called it the biggest moment for women’s rights in recent Chinese history. The Chinese Communist Party sees popular discontent as a challenge to its authority, but this was so intense that it seemed even the party would struggle to quash it.
And yet, it did.
To find out how, I tried to track what happened to the chained woman and those who spoke out for her. I found an expansive web of intimidation at home and abroad, involving mass surveillance, censorship and detentions — a campaign that continues to this day.
The clampdown shows how rattled the authorities are by a growing movement demanding improvements to the role of women in Chinese society. Though the party says it supports gender equality, under China’s leader, Xi Jinping, the government has described motherhood as a patriotic duty, jailed women’s rights activists and censored calls for tougher laws to protect women from mistreatment.
Yet even as the crackdown forced women to hide their anger, it did not extinguish it. In secret, a new generation of activists has emerged, more determined than ever to continue fighting.
Who Is the Chained Woman?
At first sight, Dongji looks like any other village in China’s vast countryside. Two hours from the nearest city, it sits among sprawling wheat and rice fields in Jiangsu Province, half empty, most residents long departed to look for better lives elsewhere.
But when a colleague and I visited recently, one house, with faded maroon double doors, appeared to be guarded by two men. A surveillance camera on a nearby pole pointed directly at the entrance.
This was the street where the chained woman had lived.
Officially, there was little reason that her house should still be under watch, since in the government’s telling, the case had been resolved.
After widespread outrage over the government’s initial statement, in January 2022, officials promised a new investigation. Over the next month, four government offices released statements that at points conflicted with each other — offering different dates for when she was first chained, for example, or alternately suggesting that she had been homeless or gotten lost before arriving in Dongji. Finally, under intense public pressure, provincial officials in late February that year issued what they said was the definitive account.
According to that report, the woman was named Xiaohuamei, or “Little Flower Plum.” (The government did not specify whether that was a nickname or a legal name.) She was born in Yagu, an impoverished village in Yunnan Province, in China’s southwest.
As a teenager, she at times spoke or behaved in ways that were “abnormal,” the report said, and in 1998, when she was around 20, a fellow villager promised to help her seek treatment. Instead, that villager sold her for about $700.
Trafficking women has been a big business in China for decades. A longstanding cultural preference for boys, exacerbated by the one-child policy, created a surplus of tens of millions of men, many of whom could not find wives. Poor, rural men in eastern China began buying women from the country’s even poorer western regions.
Xiaohuamei was sold three times, finally to a man in Dongji — more than 2,000 miles from her hometown — who wanted a wife for his son, Dong Zhimin, the government said.
Over the next 20 years, she gave birth to eight children, even as her mental health visibly deteriorated, the government said, citing interviews with Mr. Dong and villagers. When she first arrived in Dongji, she had been able to take care of herself; by the time she was found, she had trouble communicating.
The government report did not say whether other villagers knew she had been trafficked. But self-styled charity bloggers had been visiting Mr. Dong and presenting him as a doting father since at least 2021. (The woman appeared in some videos, but unchained.)
“My biggest dream is to slowly bring the children up into healthy adults,” Mr. Dong told one blogger, before the video of the shack emerged.
Privately, though, Mr. Dong had been chaining the children’s mother around the neck and tying her with cloth ropes since 2017, the government said. He also did not take her to the hospital when she was sick.
Censors deleted the bloggers’ videos of the family and of the woman in chains. In April 2023, Mr. Dong was sentenced to prison, along with five others accused of participating in the trafficking.
The official story ended there.
Step 1: Hide the Victim
As we approached the house where the men were sitting, they jumped up and asked who we were. One made a phone call, while another blocked me from taking photos.
Ten more people soon arrived, including police officers, propaganda officials and the village leader, who insisted that the scandal had been overblown. “Everything is very normal, extremely normal,” he said. When we asked where the woman was, officials said they believed that she didn’t want visitors. Then they escorted us to the train station.
The chained woman may be choosing to stay out of the public eye. But the Chinese government often silences victims of crimes or accidents that generate public anger. Relatives of people killed in plane crashes, coronavirus patients and survivors of domestic violence have all been shuffled out of sight, threatened or detained.
Some weeks later, we tried to go back. This time, we visited a hospital where China’s state broadcaster said the woman was sent after the video went viral — her last known whereabouts.
We tracked down Dr. Teng Xiaoting, a physician who had treated her. Dr. Teng said the woman was no longer there, but said she did not know where she had gone.
Other locals we asked had no information either. But several people in neighboring villages said it was common knowledge that many women in the area, including in their own villages, had been bought from southwestern China. Some called it sad; others were matter-of-fact.
Still, it was clear that talking about such trafficking could be risky.
As we got closer to Dongji, a black Volkswagen began tailing us. Then, at least eight villagers surrounded us, calling us race traitors (we are both of Chinese heritage) and at times pushing my colleague. One said that if we had been men, they would have beaten us.
They eventually escorted us back to the main road after we called the police. Along the way, one man said it was in our own interest to be more cautious.
“If you two were taken to the market and sold,” he said, “then what would you do?”
Step 2: Silence Discussion
After the woman’s story emerged in January 2022, the controls were tightest in Dongji. But the government sprang into action across the country to suppress the debate that followed.
Legal scholars observed that the penalty for buying a trafficked woman — three years’ imprisonment — was less than that for selling an endangered bird. Others noted that judges have denied divorce applications from women known to have been abused or trafficked, and that the government has repeatedly ignored calls to criminalize marital rape.
To halt such conversations, the police tracked down people like He Peirong, a veteran human rights activist, who had traveled 200 miles to the area around Dongji to try to look for other trafficked women.
After she returned home, police officers knocked on her door, asking her why she had gone. They visited her roughly 20 times over the next month, forcing her to delete online posts about her trip and threatening to arrest her.
They also named journalists she had been in contact with, to show they were watching her communications. They even took her to nearby Anhui Province on a forced “vacation” — a common tactic used to control dissidents’ movements.
Similar crackdowns were taking place farther away. A lawyer named Lu Tingge, a resident of Hebei Province, about 600 miles from Dongji, said in an interview that a Jiangsu official had traveled to his city, urging him to withdraw a petition he’d submitted for more information about the case (he refused, but said he never received the information).
Bookstores that put up displays recommending feminist reading were forced to remove them. Numerous online articles about the woman were censored; China Digital Times, a censorship tracker, archived at least 100 of them, though there were many more.
The campaign even extended overseas. A woman living abroad said in an interview that the police called her parents in China after she posted photos of herself in chains online.
Ms. He, the veteran activist, realized that the government was more worried about feminism than she had thought. She had been detained previously for other activism, but this monthslong pressure “far surpassed that,” she said.
Step 3: Detain Those Who Persist
To avoid arrest, Ms. He stopped posting about the case. She eventually left China for Thailand.
Those who refused to stop, however, suffered the consequences.
Two other women also traveled to Jiangsu after the video emerged, to visit the chained woman at the hospital. Identifying themselves on social media only by nicknames, Wuyi and Quanmei, they said they were just ordinary women showing solidarity.
“Your sisters are coming,” Wuyi posted.
They were barred from entering the hospital or the village, according to videos on Wuyi’s Weibo. So they drove around town instead, with messages about the woman scrawled on their car in lipstick.
They quickly attracted enormous followings, their updates viewed hundreds of millions of times.
Before long, they were detained by the local police. After their release several days later, Quanmei went quiet online.
Wuyi, though, refused to be silenced. On Weibo, she said police had put a bag over her head and beat her. She shared a photo of her bruised arm, saying she was shocked that her small actions could elicit such ferocity.
“Everything I always believed, everything the country had always taught me, all became lies,” she wrote.
About two weeks later, Wuyi disappeared again. This time, the police detained her for eight months, according to an acquaintance. She was eventually released on bail and has not spoken publicly since.
The Resistance Goes Into Hiding
After Wuyi’s disappearance, the few voices still speaking out fell silent.
But the activism has not evaporated, only moved underground.
It includes people like Monica, a young woman who asked to be identified only by a first name. We met at her home, where she asked that I not bring my cellphone to avoid surveillance. Soft-spoken but assured, she recounted how police scrutiny forced her to embrace new tactics.
When the chained woman story erupted, she joined an online group of several hundred people that decided to conduct research on the trafficking of women with mental disabilities in China.
Within days, the police tracked down and interrogated participants. At around the same time, anonymous articles appeared online that doxxed some members of the group and labeled them “extreme feminists.” The group disbanded.
But the intimidation only made Monica angrier.
So a few months later, Monica and several others quietly regrouped, using an encrypted messaging platform. Rather than campaign publicly, they tried to impose pressure on the government behind the scenes.
For weeks, they studied hundreds of court cases and news stories about women who had been abused or trafficked. They wrote a 20-page report explaining the chained woman episode and laying out suggestions for reform. In July 2022, they submitted it anonymously to a U.N. committee reviewing China’s record on disability rights.
They later submitted similar reports to two other U.N. committees. A member of one of the committees, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the matter, said the reports were crucial sources of independent information from China. That person had not heard of the chained woman before.
In May 2023, U.N. officials raised the chained woman’s story during a public meeting with Chinese government representatives. The government said it had imprisoned Mr. Dong and that the woman was being cared for. Still, Monica felt proud — and emboldened: “You feel that you can still do some risky things.”
“Feminism in China really is the most vocal and active movement. It’s also very hard to completely scatter or kill off,” she said. “I think the authorities are right to be worried.”
Others have tried to subtly keep the chained woman’s legacy alive in other ways. An all-female band released a song called “So Who Has My Key?” An artist spent 365 days wearing a chain around her neck. A writer published a thinly disguised retelling of Snow White.
In December, a woman whose family had reported her missing 13 years ago was found living with a man to whom she had borne two children. The authorities claimed the woman had a disability and the man had “taken her in” — the same language officials used in an early report about the chained woman.
Social media users erupted, accusing the government of glossing over trafficking again.
Then the censors stepped in and stifled that discussion, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks-1mDC ... Television
Inside, stood a woman. She was dazed, shivering — and chained by the neck.
The video set off the biggest online uproar in China in years. People mobilized both online and offline to demand accountability.
Then, those voices disappeared.
March 5, 2025
The video blogger had visited Dongji Village, in eastern China, to find a man known for raising eight children despite deep poverty. The man had become a favorite interview subject for influencers looking to attract donations and clicks.
But that day, one of the children led the blogger to someone not featured in many other videos: the child’s mother.
She stood in a doorless shack in the family’s courtyard, on a strip of dirt floor between a bed and a brick wall. She wore a thin sweater despite the January cold. When the blogger asked if she could understand him, she shook her head. A chain around her neck shackled her to the wall.
The video quickly spread online, and immediately, Chinese commenters wondered whether the woman had been sold to the man in Dongji and forced to have his children — a kind of trafficking that is a longstanding problem in China’s countryside. They demanded the government intervene.
Instead, local officials issued a short statement brushing off the concerns: The woman was legally married to the man and had not been trafficked. She was chained up because she was mentally ill and sometimes hit people.
Public outrage only grew. People wrote blog posts demanding to know why women could be treated like animals. Others printed fliers or visited the village to investigate for themselves. This was about more than trafficking, people said. It was another reason many young women were reluctant to get married or have children, because the government treated marriage as a license to abuse.
The outcry rippled nationwide for weeks. Many observers called it the biggest moment for women’s rights in recent Chinese history. The Chinese Communist Party sees popular discontent as a challenge to its authority, but this was so intense that it seemed even the party would struggle to quash it.
And yet, it did.
To find out how, I tried to track what happened to the chained woman and those who spoke out for her. I found an expansive web of intimidation at home and abroad, involving mass surveillance, censorship and detentions — a campaign that continues to this day.
The clampdown shows how rattled the authorities are by a growing movement demanding improvements to the role of women in Chinese society. Though the party says it supports gender equality, under China’s leader, Xi Jinping, the government has described motherhood as a patriotic duty, jailed women’s rights activists and censored calls for tougher laws to protect women from mistreatment.
Yet even as the crackdown forced women to hide their anger, it did not extinguish it. In secret, a new generation of activists has emerged, more determined than ever to continue fighting.
Who Is the Chained Woman?
At first sight, Dongji looks like any other village in China’s vast countryside. Two hours from the nearest city, it sits among sprawling wheat and rice fields in Jiangsu Province, half empty, most residents long departed to look for better lives elsewhere.
But when a colleague and I visited recently, one house, with faded maroon double doors, appeared to be guarded by two men. A surveillance camera on a nearby pole pointed directly at the entrance.
This was the street where the chained woman had lived.
Officially, there was little reason that her house should still be under watch, since in the government’s telling, the case had been resolved.
After widespread outrage over the government’s initial statement, in January 2022, officials promised a new investigation. Over the next month, four government offices released statements that at points conflicted with each other — offering different dates for when she was first chained, for example, or alternately suggesting that she had been homeless or gotten lost before arriving in Dongji. Finally, under intense public pressure, provincial officials in late February that year issued what they said was the definitive account.
According to that report, the woman was named Xiaohuamei, or “Little Flower Plum.” (The government did not specify whether that was a nickname or a legal name.) She was born in Yagu, an impoverished village in Yunnan Province, in China’s southwest.
As a teenager, she at times spoke or behaved in ways that were “abnormal,” the report said, and in 1998, when she was around 20, a fellow villager promised to help her seek treatment. Instead, that villager sold her for about $700.
Trafficking women has been a big business in China for decades. A longstanding cultural preference for boys, exacerbated by the one-child policy, created a surplus of tens of millions of men, many of whom could not find wives. Poor, rural men in eastern China began buying women from the country’s even poorer western regions.
Xiaohuamei was sold three times, finally to a man in Dongji — more than 2,000 miles from her hometown — who wanted a wife for his son, Dong Zhimin, the government said.
Over the next 20 years, she gave birth to eight children, even as her mental health visibly deteriorated, the government said, citing interviews with Mr. Dong and villagers. When she first arrived in Dongji, she had been able to take care of herself; by the time she was found, she had trouble communicating.
The government report did not say whether other villagers knew she had been trafficked. But self-styled charity bloggers had been visiting Mr. Dong and presenting him as a doting father since at least 2021. (The woman appeared in some videos, but unchained.)
“My biggest dream is to slowly bring the children up into healthy adults,” Mr. Dong told one blogger, before the video of the shack emerged.
Privately, though, Mr. Dong had been chaining the children’s mother around the neck and tying her with cloth ropes since 2017, the government said. He also did not take her to the hospital when she was sick.
Censors deleted the bloggers’ videos of the family and of the woman in chains. In April 2023, Mr. Dong was sentenced to prison, along with five others accused of participating in the trafficking.
The official story ended there.
Step 1: Hide the Victim
As we approached the house where the men were sitting, they jumped up and asked who we were. One made a phone call, while another blocked me from taking photos.
Ten more people soon arrived, including police officers, propaganda officials and the village leader, who insisted that the scandal had been overblown. “Everything is very normal, extremely normal,” he said. When we asked where the woman was, officials said they believed that she didn’t want visitors. Then they escorted us to the train station.
The chained woman may be choosing to stay out of the public eye. But the Chinese government often silences victims of crimes or accidents that generate public anger. Relatives of people killed in plane crashes, coronavirus patients and survivors of domestic violence have all been shuffled out of sight, threatened or detained.
Some weeks later, we tried to go back. This time, we visited a hospital where China’s state broadcaster said the woman was sent after the video went viral — her last known whereabouts.
We tracked down Dr. Teng Xiaoting, a physician who had treated her. Dr. Teng said the woman was no longer there, but said she did not know where she had gone.
Other locals we asked had no information either. But several people in neighboring villages said it was common knowledge that many women in the area, including in their own villages, had been bought from southwestern China. Some called it sad; others were matter-of-fact.
Still, it was clear that talking about such trafficking could be risky.
As we got closer to Dongji, a black Volkswagen began tailing us. Then, at least eight villagers surrounded us, calling us race traitors (we are both of Chinese heritage) and at times pushing my colleague. One said that if we had been men, they would have beaten us.
They eventually escorted us back to the main road after we called the police. Along the way, one man said it was in our own interest to be more cautious.
“If you two were taken to the market and sold,” he said, “then what would you do?”
Step 2: Silence Discussion
After the woman’s story emerged in January 2022, the controls were tightest in Dongji. But the government sprang into action across the country to suppress the debate that followed.
Legal scholars observed that the penalty for buying a trafficked woman — three years’ imprisonment — was less than that for selling an endangered bird. Others noted that judges have denied divorce applications from women known to have been abused or trafficked, and that the government has repeatedly ignored calls to criminalize marital rape.
To halt such conversations, the police tracked down people like He Peirong, a veteran human rights activist, who had traveled 200 miles to the area around Dongji to try to look for other trafficked women.
After she returned home, police officers knocked on her door, asking her why she had gone. They visited her roughly 20 times over the next month, forcing her to delete online posts about her trip and threatening to arrest her.
They also named journalists she had been in contact with, to show they were watching her communications. They even took her to nearby Anhui Province on a forced “vacation” — a common tactic used to control dissidents’ movements.
Similar crackdowns were taking place farther away. A lawyer named Lu Tingge, a resident of Hebei Province, about 600 miles from Dongji, said in an interview that a Jiangsu official had traveled to his city, urging him to withdraw a petition he’d submitted for more information about the case (he refused, but said he never received the information).
Bookstores that put up displays recommending feminist reading were forced to remove them. Numerous online articles about the woman were censored; China Digital Times, a censorship tracker, archived at least 100 of them, though there were many more.
The campaign even extended overseas. A woman living abroad said in an interview that the police called her parents in China after she posted photos of herself in chains online.
Ms. He, the veteran activist, realized that the government was more worried about feminism than she had thought. She had been detained previously for other activism, but this monthslong pressure “far surpassed that,” she said.
Step 3: Detain Those Who Persist
To avoid arrest, Ms. He stopped posting about the case. She eventually left China for Thailand.
Those who refused to stop, however, suffered the consequences.
Two other women also traveled to Jiangsu after the video emerged, to visit the chained woman at the hospital. Identifying themselves on social media only by nicknames, Wuyi and Quanmei, they said they were just ordinary women showing solidarity.
“Your sisters are coming,” Wuyi posted.
They were barred from entering the hospital or the village, according to videos on Wuyi’s Weibo. So they drove around town instead, with messages about the woman scrawled on their car in lipstick.
They quickly attracted enormous followings, their updates viewed hundreds of millions of times.
Before long, they were detained by the local police. After their release several days later, Quanmei went quiet online.
Wuyi, though, refused to be silenced. On Weibo, she said police had put a bag over her head and beat her. She shared a photo of her bruised arm, saying she was shocked that her small actions could elicit such ferocity.
“Everything I always believed, everything the country had always taught me, all became lies,” she wrote.
About two weeks later, Wuyi disappeared again. This time, the police detained her for eight months, according to an acquaintance. She was eventually released on bail and has not spoken publicly since.
The Resistance Goes Into Hiding
After Wuyi’s disappearance, the few voices still speaking out fell silent.
But the activism has not evaporated, only moved underground.
It includes people like Monica, a young woman who asked to be identified only by a first name. We met at her home, where she asked that I not bring my cellphone to avoid surveillance. Soft-spoken but assured, she recounted how police scrutiny forced her to embrace new tactics.
When the chained woman story erupted, she joined an online group of several hundred people that decided to conduct research on the trafficking of women with mental disabilities in China.
Within days, the police tracked down and interrogated participants. At around the same time, anonymous articles appeared online that doxxed some members of the group and labeled them “extreme feminists.” The group disbanded.
But the intimidation only made Monica angrier.
So a few months later, Monica and several others quietly regrouped, using an encrypted messaging platform. Rather than campaign publicly, they tried to impose pressure on the government behind the scenes.
For weeks, they studied hundreds of court cases and news stories about women who had been abused or trafficked. They wrote a 20-page report explaining the chained woman episode and laying out suggestions for reform. In July 2022, they submitted it anonymously to a U.N. committee reviewing China’s record on disability rights.
They later submitted similar reports to two other U.N. committees. A member of one of the committees, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the matter, said the reports were crucial sources of independent information from China. That person had not heard of the chained woman before.
In May 2023, U.N. officials raised the chained woman’s story during a public meeting with Chinese government representatives. The government said it had imprisoned Mr. Dong and that the woman was being cared for. Still, Monica felt proud — and emboldened: “You feel that you can still do some risky things.”
“Feminism in China really is the most vocal and active movement. It’s also very hard to completely scatter or kill off,” she said. “I think the authorities are right to be worried.”
Others have tried to subtly keep the chained woman’s legacy alive in other ways. An all-female band released a song called “So Who Has My Key?” An artist spent 365 days wearing a chain around her neck. A writer published a thinly disguised retelling of Snow White.
In December, a woman whose family had reported her missing 13 years ago was found living with a man to whom she had borne two children. The authorities claimed the woman had a disability and the man had “taken her in” — the same language officials used in an early report about the chained woman.
Social media users erupted, accusing the government of glossing over trafficking again.
Then the censors stepped in and stifled that discussion, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks-1mDC ... Television
Re: The long-read articles thread.
98I was just about to post this. I think a lot of us that grew up outside of the US but steeped in American culture have/had a very rose tinted view of the US. I grew up on Star Wars, Spielberg films, Eights Enough and Ripley’s Believe it or Not. New Zealand in the 1980s was a weird mix of a (evaporating) Swedish welfare state and American consumerism. Every time I’ve visited it I’ve loved it. We came for three months (90 day limit) a year for four years from 2013 and worked remotely. But the current situation means I doubt we’ll ever visit again. My wife in her early twenties was deported after they found a work lanyard in her bag coming back from Brazil. She’d had a scholarship and in youthful naivety got a job at a State government department for the experience. Eventually she was allowed back in and got a visa. Now though…. There would be an extreme risk they refuse her entry due to a 30 year old mistake, even with the visa. Tourism bookings for the US are dropping sharply after the reports of normal tourists being incarcerated for weeks in a whim of a HLS agent. It’s depressing. For all the US’s glaring problems and contradictions I genuinely loved visiting. We considered an H1B visa at one point. We have close friends there, even they are telling us to avoid at the moment.Rocky Rockbottom wrote: Sun Apr 20, 2025 4:07 am https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng- ... ump-canada
It sucks.
clocker bob may 30, 2006 wrote:I think the possibility of interbreeding between an earthly species and an extraterrestrial species is as believable as any other explanation for the existence of George W. Bush.
Re: The long-read articles thread.
99"There is no one who feels more betrayed by the American dream than the world’s richest man."Rocky Rockbottom wrote: Sun Apr 20, 2025 4:07 am https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng- ... ump-canada
About sums it up.
Re: The long-read articles thread.
100Kyiv’s plan to smuggle more than 100 drones into enemy territory required meticulous planning, high-tech gadgets—and luck
Inside Ukraine’s Daring ‘Operation Spiderweb’ Attack on Russia
By James Marson, WSJ
Dec. 9, 2025
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 BS,” the driver told the transport manager, Artem Tymofeyev. “There are drones under the roof.”
“WTF?” 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’s not enough’
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.
image.png
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.
Finally, from May 23 to 26, five trucks set out from Chelyabinsk in different directions carrying eight houses on journeys that would last several days. The drivers were oblivious to their real cargo.
‘Everything is flying’
The Tymofeyevs were asleep at home in Chelyabinsk when the driver called in shock at discovering drones. The roof of the cabin on his truck had slid off 180 miles into the 2,000-mile drive, revealing the drones inside.
It was a heart-stopping moment for the couple. One wrong word and their cover could be blown and the FSB racing to their door. After calming the driver, Tymofeyev called the SBU planner, who consulted with Maliuk. The SBU chief came up with the hunting lodge story. One factor worked in the Ukrainians’ favor: The driver couldn’t see the explosives, which were concealed within the bodies of the drones.
The driver bought the story. He fixed the roof with the help of a local tractor driver.
It was the one point the SBU worried most that the FSB might get wind of the operation. The SBU planner said he overestimated his foe, but also that he saw an element of divine guidance that helped them through tough moments, as he and Maliuk would regularly pray together.
The SBU had to overcome other headaches along the route, such as finding a replacement truck after one of them suffered a mechanical issue.
The Ukrainian team gathered at the operational headquarters in Kyiv at dawn on June 1. The trucks were set to arrive at inconspicuous locations near the airfields, such as gas stations, to release their cargo.
Maliuk stood in front of the pilots and finally revealed the targets of their mission: Russia’s bomber fleet. He displayed maps and schematics of the planes with their weak spots marked, so the pilots knew where to strike.
The pilots, accustomed to the high pressure of front-line combat, reacted with sangfroid.
“There was no anxiety,” recalled one pilot. “We had a specific goal and we knew we would achieve it.”
A problem soon arose: The link between Kyiv and two cabins—on the truck that had been replaced—was spotty.
SBU members in Kyiv tried to guide the driver to tweak the wiring inside one of the cabins, but it didn’t seem to be working. Then he stopped answering their calls. Images of the burned-out cabins later appeared online, indicating that something had triggered a fire that caused the cabins and their cargo to explode, killing the driver.
Meanwhile, the other four trucks had arrived and were ready for action.
“Let’s get to work. Operators, to your battle stations,” instructed Maliuk as he prowled the room, according to video footage.
The pilots took their seats. Thousands of miles away, the roofs of the cabins slid open, and 117 drones launched toward the airfields. The pilots flew using monitors, and groups soon gathered around to watch the action.
“Once the first strikes took place, there was nothing complicated about where to fly,” said another pilot. “You just flew up in the air, saw the black smoke and understood where to fly.”
Cheers broke out as plane after plane was hit.
“It was so emotional,” the pilot said. “When you hear someone cheering, you understand that everything is working, everything is flying.”
In Russia, onlookers including military personnel and the truck drivers themselves watched in astonishment as the parade of drones took to the skies.
By the time the assaults were finished an hour later, 41 Russian planes had been struck and damaged, at least a dozen of them irreparably, according to Ukraine’s tally. Some analysts have suggested that count might overestimate the damage, based on satellite imagery. The SBU has stuck by its numbers, saying Russia sought to trick analysts by moving undamaged aircraft to replace damaged ones.
The following day, Russian authorities named Tymofeyev as a suspect. He and his wife were already gone.
Five days earlier, at around 7 a.m., the couple had crossed the border into Kazakhstan in a hired Toyota Hiace van, under the pretense of taking a vacation. They brought their most valuable belongings, including a Scottish Straight cat and a Shih Tzu dog.
Inside Ukraine’s Daring ‘Operation Spiderweb’ Attack on Russia
By James Marson, WSJ
Dec. 9, 2025
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 BS,” the driver told the transport manager, Artem Tymofeyev. “There are drones under the roof.”
“WTF?” 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’s not enough’
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.
image.png
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.
Finally, from May 23 to 26, five trucks set out from Chelyabinsk in different directions carrying eight houses on journeys that would last several days. The drivers were oblivious to their real cargo.
‘Everything is flying’
The Tymofeyevs were asleep at home in Chelyabinsk when the driver called in shock at discovering drones. The roof of the cabin on his truck had slid off 180 miles into the 2,000-mile drive, revealing the drones inside.
It was a heart-stopping moment for the couple. One wrong word and their cover could be blown and the FSB racing to their door. After calming the driver, Tymofeyev called the SBU planner, who consulted with Maliuk. The SBU chief came up with the hunting lodge story. One factor worked in the Ukrainians’ favor: The driver couldn’t see the explosives, which were concealed within the bodies of the drones.
The driver bought the story. He fixed the roof with the help of a local tractor driver.
It was the one point the SBU worried most that the FSB might get wind of the operation. The SBU planner said he overestimated his foe, but also that he saw an element of divine guidance that helped them through tough moments, as he and Maliuk would regularly pray together.
The SBU had to overcome other headaches along the route, such as finding a replacement truck after one of them suffered a mechanical issue.
The Ukrainian team gathered at the operational headquarters in Kyiv at dawn on June 1. The trucks were set to arrive at inconspicuous locations near the airfields, such as gas stations, to release their cargo.
Maliuk stood in front of the pilots and finally revealed the targets of their mission: Russia’s bomber fleet. He displayed maps and schematics of the planes with their weak spots marked, so the pilots knew where to strike.
The pilots, accustomed to the high pressure of front-line combat, reacted with sangfroid.
“There was no anxiety,” recalled one pilot. “We had a specific goal and we knew we would achieve it.”
A problem soon arose: The link between Kyiv and two cabins—on the truck that had been replaced—was spotty.
SBU members in Kyiv tried to guide the driver to tweak the wiring inside one of the cabins, but it didn’t seem to be working. Then he stopped answering their calls. Images of the burned-out cabins later appeared online, indicating that something had triggered a fire that caused the cabins and their cargo to explode, killing the driver.
Meanwhile, the other four trucks had arrived and were ready for action.
“Let’s get to work. Operators, to your battle stations,” instructed Maliuk as he prowled the room, according to video footage.
The pilots took their seats. Thousands of miles away, the roofs of the cabins slid open, and 117 drones launched toward the airfields. The pilots flew using monitors, and groups soon gathered around to watch the action.
“Once the first strikes took place, there was nothing complicated about where to fly,” said another pilot. “You just flew up in the air, saw the black smoke and understood where to fly.”
Cheers broke out as plane after plane was hit.
“It was so emotional,” the pilot said. “When you hear someone cheering, you understand that everything is working, everything is flying.”
In Russia, onlookers including military personnel and the truck drivers themselves watched in astonishment as the parade of drones took to the skies.
By the time the assaults were finished an hour later, 41 Russian planes had been struck and damaged, at least a dozen of them irreparably, according to Ukraine’s tally. Some analysts have suggested that count might overestimate the damage, based on satellite imagery. The SBU has stuck by its numbers, saying Russia sought to trick analysts by moving undamaged aircraft to replace damaged ones.
The following day, Russian authorities named Tymofeyev as a suspect. He and his wife were already gone.
Five days earlier, at around 7 a.m., the couple had crossed the border into Kazakhstan in a hired Toyota Hiace van, under the pretense of taking a vacation. They brought their most valuable belongings, including a Scottish Straight cat and a Shih Tzu dog.