Russia, Ukraine trade drone barrages ahead of talks in Turkey

Kyiv: Russia and Ukraine launched large-scale drone barrages overnight, Kyiv and Moscow said Monday, hours before negotiators from the two sides were to start a second round of direct talks in Turkey.

The Russian defence ministry said its air defence units had "intercepted and destroyed" 162 Ukrainian drones.
The majority were downed over regions bordering Ukraine, with 57 intercepted over the Kursk region and 31 over the Belgorod region, it said.

The barrage came hours before Ukrainian and Russian delegations were to sit down for talks in Istanbul, only the second round of direct talks since the weeks after Moscow sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022.

It also came a day after Ukraine said it carried out one of its most brazen and successful attacks on Russian soil, hitting dozens of strategic bombers parked at airbases deep inside Russia, thousands of kilometres behind the front line.

The operation, code-named "Spider's web", required months of preparation and the smuggling of drones into Russian territory. Ukraine said Russia had attacked its territory with 80 drones overnight, including Iranian-designed Shahed-type unmanned aerial vehicles, as well as four missiles. It added that the projectiles managed to strike 12 targets.

Local officials released images showing damaged residential buildings in the eastern city of Kharkiv.

Separately, officials in the southern region of Kherson said a 40-year-old man was killed in the frontline territory by Russian artillery.

Spider's Web attack
The "Spider's web" operation was prepared for over a year and a half, the Ukrainian SBU source said, adding that it had required particularly complex logistics.

Ukraine regularly launches drones to strike targets in Russia in response to the Russian invasion of 2022, but the modus operandi used this time was different.

The Ukrainian security source said drones had been smuggled into Russia and hidden in wooden structures installed on trucks.

The structures' roofs were then opened remotely to let the drones fly toward their targets.

Photos shared by the SBU show numerous small black drones hidden in what appears to be transport containers.

Russia's defence ministry confirmed that the drones were not launched from Ukrainian territory but "in the immediate vicinity of the airbases".

Damage
Ukraine has claimed significant damage but for now it is impossible to verify independently.

A source in Ukraine's SBU security service said the coordinated attacks hit 41 aircraft used to "bomb Ukrainian cities", citing the Tu-95 and Tu-22 strategic bombers and the A-50 radar detection and command aircraft.

Russia's defence ministry confirmed that "several aircraft caught fire" following a drone attack at bases in the regions of Murmansk and Irkutsk, located in the Russian Arctic and eastern Siberia.

The fires were contained, the ministry said, and caused no casualties, adding that suspects had been "arrested".

Ukrainian security services said they destroyed 34 percent of Russian strategic bombers carrying cruise missiles, claiming to have inflicted damages amounting to $7 billion.

Longest-range ever
Zelensky on Sunday hailed the operation's "brilliant" results in what he called "our most long-range operation" in more than three years of war.

Using 117 drones, Ukraine was able to reach regions thousands of kilometres from the front, when its attacks generally focus on areas close to its borders.

Two of the airbases Ukraine said it had hit, Olenya and Belaya, are around 1,900 kilometres (1,180 miles) and 4,300 kilometres from Ukraine. The first is located in the Russian Arctic, the other in eastern Siberia.

The Russian ministry said it successfully countered other attacks in the regions of Ivanovo and Ryazan as well as in Amur, near the border with China in the Russian Far East.