Back in February, with Ukraine’s overstretched military struggling to hold the line and the Russian onslaught grinding into its fourth year, Donald Trump berated Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, telling him that he didn’t “have any cards”. The clear implication was that the Ukrainian president should accept he could not win the war and push for a peace deal on any available terms. But in the three months since it has become clear – perhaps even to Trump – that Vladimir Putin is not seriously interested in peace on terms other than Ukraine’s capitulation, and that Zelensky had a stronger hand than his US counterpart understood, with an audacious plan to strike deep inside Russia that was more than 18 months in the making.
Shortly after midday on 1 June, secret panels concealed in the roofs of lorries parked near four Russian airfields slid back and a fleet of small quadcopter drones took off towards their targets, flying too low and too close to be intercepted by Russian air defences. Ukraine’s SBU security service claims that 117 drones took part in the attack, damaging or destroying 41 Russian aircraft, including several of the country’s nuclear capable strategic bombers, at bases ranging from Murmansk in the Russian Arctic to Irkutsk in Siberia, around 4,500 kilometres east of the Ukrainian border. (Those figures have yet to be independently verified but satellite imagery shows clear indications of damage.)
Codenamed “Operation Spider’s Web,” the attack is said to have been directed by Vasyl Malyuk, the head of the SBU, and personally supervised by Zelensky. Afterwards, the president congratulated Malyuk in a social media post, calling the operation an “absolutely brilliant result” which would “undoubtedly be in history books”. Alongside photos of the two men shaking hands and embracing, Zelensky stressed that the operation was conducted “solely by Ukraine” and that everyone involved had made it safely out of Russia. (The latter claim has been disputed by Moscow, which claims to have detained multiple suspects.) Zelensky said the operation had taken one year, six months, and nine days to bring to fruition and that it was intended “to make Russia feel the need to end this war”. Later that day two trains also derailed in western Russia, in separate regions bordering Ukraine, killing at least seven people in suspected acts of sabotage.
Russia has stepped up its attacks on Ukraine in recent days, launching multiple large-scale drone and missile barrages of Ukrainian cities, including some of the biggest aerial bombardments since the start of the war in 2022, with swarms of drones intended to overwhelm Ukraine’s defences. Russian ground forces have also opened up a new front in northern Ukraine and launched a renewed assault in the eastern Donetsk region towards the strategically important city of Pokrovsk as part of what appears to be a summer offensive. “I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin,” Trump, who has long insisted the Russian president wants to end the war, posted online on 26 May. “He has gone absolutely CRAZY.”
Against this backdrop it is no surprise that the latest round of talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul on 2 June broke up after just over an hour with little discernible progress. The two sides agreed to exchange around 1,000 wounded prisoners of war, along with those aged 18 to 25, and to return the remains of 6,000 soldiers respectively. But reports in Russian state media indicated that the Kremlin has not backed down from the maximalist demands it has held out since the start of the war, insisting that in order to halt the fighting, Ukraine must agree to reduce the size of its military, forswear membership of Nato, and withdraw its troops from the four Ukrainian regions Russia claims to have annexed but does not fully control. In other words, the only terms Moscow is prepared to accept amount to Kyiv’s de facto surrender.
The ongoing talks, such as they are, seem designed more to mollify Trump, with both sides seeking to demonstrate that they are not the obstacle to peace, rather than bringing the war meaningfully closer to an end. In truth, the conflict is escalating – and the latest round of attacks signals a new, more dangerous phase of mutual brinkmanship. It is unlikely that Ukraine’s mass drone strikes will persuade Putin that he must now abandon his war aims and seek an expedited peace. On the contrary, in response to what some commentators are calling “Russia’s Pearl Harbour” – a reference to the Japanese attack on the US Pacific Fleet in December 1941 during the Second World War – Putin will surely be even more determined to punish Ukraine’s recalcitrance. Russia’s day of infamy must be seen to be met with resolve and strength, not defeat.
It is ironic that Putin has succeeded in creating a genuine threat to Russian territory where none existed at the start of this war. Through his aggression he has transformed the phantom enemy that he conjured to justify his invasion of Ukraine in 2022 into reality. (Although, of course, that threat would disappear, and the attacks on Russia would stop if he ceased his assault.) He may well now seek to exploit the Ukrainian drone strikes to drum up more domestic support for his war, shoring up his claim that Russia is fighting a new “great patriotic war” – just as their ancestors did during the Second World War – to defend the motherland. He is unlikely to believe Zelensky’s claims that this attack was authored solely by Kyiv, and will present it instead as further evidence of the wider war he insists Russia is fighting against a hostile West.
This is not the first time Russia has suffered serious military setbacks since the start of the war – the sinking of the Moskva, the failure of the assault on Kyiv, the attack on the Kerch bridge to Crimea, and the forced withdrawal from Kherson and Kharkiv, to name just a few. But Putin’s consistent response has been to regroup and double down, often accompanied by nuclear sabre-rattling intended to unsettle Ukraine’s Western allies. The Russian president will likely lean on the same strategy now, playing on Trump’s oft-repeated fears that the conflict risks spiralling into “World War III” in the hope that the US will pressure Kyiv to back down, or Trump will come to view the war as hopelessly intractable and follow through on his threats to walk away.
Yet the other consistent feature of this conflict has been Ukraine’s repeated capacity to defy expectations. From the very first hours of the Russian invasion, when Western intelligence reports assessed that Kyiv would be overrun within a matter of days, Ukraine has fought back instead, defending itself, as this latest operation exemplifies, with ingenuity against its much bigger, better armed adversary. The resulting tactics – such as the crucial role played by indigenously produced drones – are transforming the nature of modern warfare.
Just as Putin is unlikely to be cowed into offering major concessions and suing for peace, so too is Zelensky likely to be further convinced that Ukraine can still win this war, or at least secure a peace deal on acceptable terms, with or without US support. The end of this war appears further away than ever, but it turns out that Ukraine still has cards to play after all.
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