A large-scale drone attack by Ukraine on Sunday, June 1, hit Russian airbases in five different regions of the country, including the Far East and Siberia. The furthest target was the Belaya military airfield in Siberia’s Irkutsk region, about 4,300 kilometers (2,672 miles) east of Ukraine. According to Russian authorities, 53 drones rained down on five regions within the span of an hour and a half. Other targets of what Ukraine dubbed operation “Spider’s Web” included the Olenya air base on the Kola Peninsula in Murmansk, near the Arctic, some 1,900 kilometers (1,180 miles) away from the front lines; the Dyagilevo air base some 200 kilometers (124 miles) southeast of Moscow and the Ivanovo airfield, 300 kilometers (186 miles) northeast of Moscow.
The British Financial Times celebrated the attack as “possibly… the most audacious attack of the war” by Ukraine. It comes just days after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared that Germany, which invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, killing at least 27 million people, would provide Ukraine with long-range missiles to strike targets deep inside Russian territory.
This timing was hardly a coincidence. The strikes deep inside Russia’s territory, thousands of miles away from the battlefield, were clearly meant to demonstrate both to Russia and to Ukraine’s imperialist backers that it can and will use such long-range missiles to escalate the war within Russia. The attack is all the more sinister as it was carried out less than a month after the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, which the general in charge of the “Situation Command Ukraine” in the German Bundeswehr spent in the company of the neo-Nazi commander of a Ukrainian drone battalion.
Sunday’s attack was personally overseen by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and carried out by the fascist-infested Secret Service of Ukraine (SBU). The SBU, the Ukrainian equivalent of the FBI, has assumed an ever more central role in the war, both in military operations and the suppression of anti-war dissent. Just over a year ago, the SBU arrested Ukrainian Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk; he is one of thousands of workers and youth now imprisoned on trumped-up charges of “collaboration” and “high treason.”
Zelensky and SBU officials have been gloating about what they called an “absolutely brilliant result.” The SBU claims that the attack, which was 18 months in the making, caused $7 billion worth of damage and destroyed 34 percent of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet. However, according to a celebratory report by the Wall Street Journal, it is unclear how many of these aircraft were still in use.
A former Ukrainian officer told the Financial Times that the attack would likely not directly influence Russia’s position on the battlefield. Nevertheless, he added, “It does reduce Russia’s strategic capabilities [which] mean the ability to project power globally, the ability to deliver nuclear strikes and overall military posture in Eurasia.”
The attack marks a new stage in the war strategy pursued by NATO via its proxy in Kiev to destabilize Russia from within. Over the past three years, through terrorist attacks such as the one on Moscow’s Crocus City Hall, which claimed over 180 lives, Ukraine already opened up a second front of the war, inside of Russia.
In a video message, Volodymyr Zelensky proudly declared that the drone attack had been prepared from within Russia and that Ukrainian personnel had been present in three different regions. The drones were initially smuggled into the country and then placed in trucks from where they were fired off. While Zelensky claimed that all those involved had returned to Ukraine, Russian authorities announced Sunday night that they had arrested an undisclosed number of participants in the attacks.
Zelensky’s boasting about the SBU’s penetration of Russian territory was all the more provocative as less than 24 hours earlier, in the night from Saturday to Sunday, two bridges in Russian border regions were blown up. Russian authorities have described the explosions as “terrorist attacks.”
The collapse of a bridge in the Bryansk region caused debris to fall on a passenger train. As a result, at least seven people died, and 73 were wounded. The attack on a bridge in Kursk made a freight locomotive crash onto a road, injuring three railway workers. Although Ukraine has not officially taken responsibility for the attacks, Zelensky’s boasting about Ukrainian personnel on Russian soil and the history of terrorist attacks on Russian territory with traces leading back to Kiev speak for themselves.
Ukraine’s demonstrative escalation of the war comes as delegations from Kiev and Moscow are set to meet for another round of negotiations in Istanbul on Monday, June 2. On Sunday night, Moscow launched 472 drones in what Ukraine’s air force has described as Russia’s largest drone attack since 2022. Other reports indicate that Russia is in the midst of launching a new summer offensive. Whatever the outcome of the talks under these conditions, Sunday’s drone attacks underscore that, already, the war has extended well beyond the borders of Ukraine.
Having deliberately provoked the oligarchic Putin regime into invading Ukraine, the imperialist powers have transformed the country into a launching pad for a much broader war. Their principal aim is to secure full control over the Eurasian landmass and its vast resources.
For their part, with acts such as Sunday’s drone attack, the SBU and the Ukrainian oligarchy signal that they are determined to continue to play a central role in this imperialist effort to carve up the entire region and thus earn their “right” to a share of the spoils, even after hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have been left dead and injured.
The working class of Russia and the entire former Soviet Union faces an existential threat from imperialism. But the Putin regime offers no “protection” against this threat. Just as the Ukrainian oligarchy, it emerged out of the Stalinist destruction of the Soviet Union, which opened up the entire region to imperialist provocations and wars.
The Putin regime seeks to defend the interests and privileges of the Russian oligarchy through a combination of military pressure and negotiations with the imperialist powers. It sees its principal enemy not in imperialism, but in the working class. Its policies of military adventurism and Russian chauvinism divide the working class and play into the hands of imperialism.
The only viable path in the struggle against imperialism lies in the political revival of the principles of revolutionary internationalism in the Russian and Ukrainian working class, and their independent mobilization, together with workers in Europe and the US, against imperialism and the capitalist system as a whole.