Ukraine on Sunday committed a massive, “Pearl Harbor”-like drone strike on Russia so devastating that experts are expecting a furious reaction from Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“We can expect a great deal of sound and fury from Moscow,” Keir Giles of the London-based think tank Chatham House warned Newsweek.
A Kremlin-backed newspaper meanwhile compared the strike to Russia’s “Pearl Harbor.”
This is a Tu-95 nuclear bomber. Russia has just 47 of them. It’s 4 engine, Can carry huge payloads. An FPV drone cost 40,000 Rs, here it pauses, and targets the fuel tank of the aircraft. Successfully destroying it. This is like the Russian Pearl Harbor. pic.twitter.com/yYF1lS99mp
— Gabbar (@GabbbarSingh) June 1, 2025
Officially called “Operation Spider Web,” the drone operation targeted Russian planes at major airbases in Irkutsk Oblast, Murmansk Oblast, Ryazan Oblast, and Ivanovo Oblast.
The Ukrainian Security Service claimed the strikes damaged or destroyed over 40 Russian military aircraft, including strategic bombers like Tu-95s and Tu-22M3s, in addition to at least one A-50 surveillance plane, as reported by CNN.
An SBU source further reportedly described seeing the planes “burning en masse” thanks to drones that’d been launched from Ukrainian trucks inside Russia.
Footage of a Ukrainian FPV strike drone rising from a cargo truck and heading towards Russia’s Belaya Airbase.
The drone launch and airbase hit were over 4000 km (2500 mi) from Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/XU7bCzV5QJ
— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) June 1, 2025
Will this attack cause Russia to escalate it’s offensive against Ukraine?
Sven Biscop, a director at the Egmont Institute think tank in Brussels, told NBC News that the strike proved that Russia wasn’t “winning” as much as it thought it was.
“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,” he explained.
“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.
He also expressed amazement that Ukraine managed to destroy “a significant part of [the Russians’] bomber force.”
The outlet called it “a stunning, audacious attack.”
According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the successful strike took over a year and a half to plan.
The strikes came only days out from from the latest round of peace talks between the warring nations.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s former senior adviser, Dan Caldwell, criticized the strike in a post on X, arguing that it wasn’t conducive to peace to commit such an attack.
Ukraine has a right to defend itself and has suffered tremendously from Russian air attacks last few weeks.
But it is not in America’s interest for Ukraine to be attacking Russia’s strategic nuclear forces the day before another round of peace talks. https://t.co/F4uX3dLuJJ
— Dan Caldwell 🇺🇸 (@dandcaldwell) June 1, 2025
The Trump administration reportedly wasn’t aware of the strike beforehand.
“Ukraine did not inform @potus ahead of its major drone attack on Russia today, an administration official tells NewsNation,” NewsNation senior assignment editor Kevin Bohn reported on X.
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