Ukraine’s massive drone attack deep inside Russia lays bare Putin’s vulnerability

It was a stunning, audacious attack whose widespread effects are only just becoming clear.

Ukraine managed to smuggle 117 aerial drones on the backs of trucks that deposited them at the perimeter of four Russian air bases — one of them deep inside Siberia some 2,500 miles from Ukraine’s borders, according to Ukrainian officials.

While there are differing accounts on the extent of the ensuing damage of Sunday’s “Spiderweb” operation, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said 40 Russian aircraft — 34% of Russia’s strategic cruise missile carriers — were hit. Ukraine’s security service, the SBU, put the estimated cost to the Kremlin at $7 billion.

Some military commentators and pro-Russian bloggers have called it the country’s “Pearl Harbor” — a reference to Japanese attack in 1941 that saw the United States enter World War II.

It came Sunday, a day before the latest round of direct peace talks between Ukraine and Russia on Monday.

There was little optimism for diplomatic progress even before the strike, with Ukraine sending its defense minister, Rustem Umerov, but Russia only dispatching the far more junior Putin aide, Vladimir Medinsky, to the Çırağan Palace in Istanbul. The talks were set to begin at 1 p.m. local time (6 a.m. ET).

A far more likely outcome is Russia continuing to bomb Ukrainian civilians — this time under the pretext of retaliation, “even though in reality these strikes are planned long in advance,” said Keir Giles, a senior consulting fellow with the London-based think-tank Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia program.

Less hard to quantify will be the huge blow to Vladimir Putin’s pride, with Western analysts in agreement that this was a humiliation for the Russian president.

“At a time when Putin seems to think that he is winning on the battlefield, this demonstrates that his forces are in fact very vulnerable,” said Sven Biscop, a director at the Egmont Institute, a think tank in Brussels. “This may not change the course of the war, but it does mean that every gain Russia makes will be at high cost.”

He added it was “quite amazing” that “a significant part of their bomber force” could “be destroyed like that.”

The strike took a year and a half to plan, according to Zelenskyy, and played out on the eve of the latest round of peace talks between Ukraine and Russia in Istanbul, Turkey.

It’s still unclear what impact the surgical strike will have on Monday’s negotiations, hopes for which were already dim thanks to the deep divisions between the positions of Kyiv and Moscow. Ukraine says it is ready to sign an unconditional 30-day ceasefire; Russia is essentially demanding Ukraine’s surrender.

Brokering the talks, President Donald Trump has shifted from the unambiguously pro-Ukrainian stance of his predecessor, President Joe Biden, and offered concessions to the Kremlin that have outraged many in the West.

At the same time, he accused Putin last week of going “absolutely crazy” by continuing to launch regular attacks on Ukraine civilians. Ultimately he has threatened to walk away from the peace talks if they do not yield the results he once promised he would achieve in just 24 hours.

Indeed, overnight into Sunday Russia launched some 500 attack drones into Ukraine, Zelenskyy said. The night next came 84 more, with at least 10 people killed and dozens more injured across the country, Ukraine’s Air Force said.

Other pro-Russia observers are calling for even more drastic measures.

“We hope that the response will be the same as the U.S. response to the attack on Pearl Harbor, or even tougher,” said one Russian military blogger, Roman Alekhin, on the messaging app Telegram.

Another pro-war Telegram channel, Dva Mayora, added that it was “a reason to launch nuclear strikes on Ukraine” — a threat often made by Putin since launching the invasion three years ago.

“We can expect a great deal of sound and fury from Moscow,” Giles said. Russia “will be working hard on convincing the United States to attempt to rein Ukraine in, in order to prevent any further damage to Russia’s means of bombarding Ukrainian cities with long range missiles,” he added.

“In a way, the more important question is how the United States reacts, and how eager it is to take Moscow‘s side and constrain Ukraine,” he said.

Alexander Smith reported from London and Daryna Mayer reported from Kyiv.