President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for months has portrayed his forces as being on the brink of victory in Ukraine.
He has suggested that he has little reason to agree to a cease-fire, seeing as Russian forces are advancing on the battlefield and are prepared to fight for the duration. He has cheered Russia’s recapture of its western Kursk region from Ukraine. And he has said, that when it comes to Ukrainian troops, Moscow has reason to believe “we are set to finish them off.”
Kyiv, over the weekend, offered its retort.
Ukraine carried out one of the most audacious attacks of the war, smuggling drones deep into the Russian heartland and launching them from semi-trucks. It destroyed or damaged at least a dozen aircraft, including many of Moscow’s nuclear-capable strategic bombers, on runways in Siberia and Russia’s Far North.
Sunday’s assault, carried out on the eve of the latest round of peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, appeared designed to send a clear message to Mr. Putin: Continuing the war still poses serious risks for Moscow, even if Ukraine is no longer able to advance on the battlefield.
“It’s all about trying to convince the Russians — whether it will succeed, I don’t know — that there is a reason now for them to negotiate seriously,” said James M. Acton, co-director of the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Wars are hard to end, Mr. Acton said, in part because the side that thinks it is winning often sees little incentive to negotiate seriously or offer any concessions.
“If the side that is doing better believes that the war is going to get more costly in the future, it has much more of an incentive,” he said.
The Ukrainian operation somewhat erodes Russia’s ability to attack Ukraine by taking out some of the aircraft Russian forces have been using to launch longer-range missiles at Ukrainian targets. Russia of late has been intensifying such attacks on Ukrainian cities, with record barrages of drones and missiles.
More broadly, the Ukrainian assault appeared aimed at stoking fear in the Kremlin about the other vulnerable targets in the Russian heartland where Kyiv could inflict pain in the future. There are many, including military supply factories and military training facilities, Mr. Acton said. Even Russia’s exposed fleet of nuclear submarines present a potential target, though Moscow hasn’t used the vessels in the war and going after them would amount to a particularly risky escalation.
“There is a ton of stuff that Ukraine can hit that would be very hard for the Russians,” Mr. Acton said. “You can’t protect everything.”
Ukraine said Sunday’s operation damaged 41 aircraft and caused some $7 billion in damage. That assessment couldn’t be independently verified.
Open-source analysis by The New York Times confirmed that at least a dozen aircraft were damaged, including Tu-95 bombers, known as Bears. U.S. and European security officials, citing preliminary assessments, estimated that as many as 20 Russian strategic aircraft may have been destroyed or severely damaged, among them six Tu-95 and four Tu-22M bombers.
Russia has limited ability to produce such bombers, meaning the attack may have permanently dented its fleet, which was already stretched by the war and its normal operations for nuclear deterrence. The aircraft are also incredibly expensive, with the Ukrainian strikes likely inflicting billions of dollars in damage.
But the attack doesn’t significantly alter Russia’s nuclear capabilities.
Before last weekend’s strike, Russia had 67 active nuclear-capable heavy bombers, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an organization founded by physicists during the Cold War that tracks nuclear forces. That count includes the Tu-95s but not the Tu-22s. Russia also possesses a fleet of nuclear submarines and hundreds of intercontinental ballistic missiles, many mounted on trucks that can be easily moved and concealed.
The Russian military will still need to reassess the vulnerability of the rest of its nuclear platforms against future Ukrainian drone attacks, a time-consuming and costly exercise. China, for example, appears to have built an underground naval base on an island to keep nuclear submarines safe from drones, but such efforts would take years for Russia to execute.
Dubbed Operation Spider’s Web by Kyiv, the Ukrainian attack is part of a consistent and escalating campaign to bring the war to Russia’s heartland in an attempt to influence the Kremlin’s calculus.
Ukraine has carried out high-profile assassinations in Russian cities, wreaked havoc on Russian oil production facilities, taken a sizable swath of Russian territory along the border, ravaged the Russian navy in the Black Sea, damaged the bridge connecting Russia to occupied Crimea and exploded drones over Moscow. The more Ukraine struggles on the battlefield, analysts say, the more likely it is that Kyiv will turn to such impactful, asymmetric attacks.
The operation was the latest indication of how far Ukraine has revolutionized drone warfare — an effort that the Biden administration supported in a number of ways, including by pouring $1.5 billion into Ukrainian drone production in late 2024 through a secretive program spearheaded by the former White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether Ukraine used drone technology funded by Washington in the operation.
David Shimer, who served as director for Ukraine on the National Security Council during the Biden administration and helped oversee the U.S. efforts, said the operation showed how the Ukrainians still have leverage, even though President Trump told President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, in an infamous Oval Office meeting earlier this year, that he didn’t “have the cards.”
“They of course have cards,” Mr. Shimer said. “They are trying to pressure Russia to the negotiating table. If the objective of the United States is to achieve a cease-fire in Ukraine, the way to do that is to help Ukraine apply pressure on Russia through more military aid and more sanctions.”
Mr. Trump has threatened to increase pressure on the Kremlin but hasn’t followed through, resisting calls by European leaders and Mr. Zelensky to impose further sanctions or find other ways to push Mr. Putin to end the war.
Mr. Putin hasn’t made any public comments about the Ukrainian operation since the attack this past weekend. It’s unclear whether the assault will succeed in changing his calculus about the war or simply prompt him to double down.
Amid the recent jockeying over peace talks, Russia’s military has also stepped up its assaults, pursuing a summer offensive to gain more territory in Ukraine and carrying out some of the biggest drone attacks in a war now in its fourth year.
Russian state news, broadly, has downplayed the Ukrainian operation, refraining from mentioning the extent of the damage to the nuclear-capable bomber fleet. Hawkish Russian military bloggers have accused officials in Russia’s nuclear force of failing to protect crucial assets, while stoking a desire for retribution and raising the possibility that Moscow should pull out of the peace talks in Istanbul.
Dmitri A. Medvedev, the former Russian president and deputy chairman of the Russian security council, seemed to respond to those hard-liners in a comment posted on Telegram early Tuesday.
Mr. Medvedev cast the negotiations in Istanbul, where Russia’s delegation presented a list of maximalist demands, as talks about the terms of Russian victory and Ukrainian capitulation — saying the negotiations were necessary for the complete destruction of what he falsely called a “Neo-Nazi government” in Kyiv.
He also promised retribution was coming.
“Retribution is inevitable,” Mr. Medvedev said, noting that the Russian military is advancing in Ukraine and will continue to advance.
“Everything that should explode will certainly explode,” he added. “And those who should be exterminated will disappear.”
Paul Sonne is an international correspondent, focusing on Russia and the varied impacts of President Vladimir V. Putin’s domestic and foreign policies, with a focus on the war against Ukraine.
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