Ukraine has launched several drone attacks on Russian air bases located far from its borders.
More than 40 aircraft have already been hit.
On Sunday 1 June, Ukraine launched a ‘large-scale special operation aimed at destroying enemy bombers’, according to an AFP source in the Ukrainian security services (SBU). The source also said that a fire had broken out at the Belaya airfield in the Irkutsk region of eastern Siberia, more than 4,200 kilometres from Ukraine.
"This is a huge operation for Ukraine and catastrophic for Russia. Russia doesn't have thousands of strategic bombers and it is using them to launch missiles against the civilian population", notes geopolitical analyst Louis Duclos on his X account. The expert, who refers to a veritable ‘Russian Pearl Harbor’ - a reference to the attack by Japanese naval air forces on the Hawaiian naval base of the same name on 7 December 1941 - also describes the bombing of the Olenya air base near Murmansk (in the north-west of the country).
Videos of these attacks, carried out by drones hidden in containers and lorries, are proliferating on this social network. ‘SBU drones target the planes that bomb Ukrainian cities every night’, says Financial Times journalist Christopher Miller.
Meanwhile, exiled Belarusian journalist Hanna Liubakova posted on her X account that, according to the Russian Telegram channel Baza, the drivers were unaware of the presence of the drones in their vehicles. Some of them have been arrested.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)