RFE RL
Ukraine says it hit dozens of long-range bomber aircraft across Russia with drones that were smuggled in wooden shipping crates carried on truck beds into the country and then launched from nearby locations.
In comments to RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service, unnamed officials with the Security Service of Ukraine, known as the SBU, claimed as many as 40 bombers may have been hit in the June 1 attack.
The SBU later put out a statement claiming 34 percent of “strategic cruise missile carriers at the main airfields of the Russian Federation” were hit in the attacks with the damages totaling some $7 billion.
The drone operation appears to be a major embarrassment for Russia’s military and intelligence agencies — and the latest in a series of audacious attacks that Ukraine has pulled on Russian soil.
“An absolutely brilliant outcome. And an outcome produced by Ukraine independently,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, noting that the operation had taken more than a year and half to prepare.
“This is our longest-range operation,” he added.
Russian officials had no immediate comment on the claims, but the Defense Ministryissued a statement saying air bases in five different regions had been targeted, and that at two of them “several aircraft caught fire.”
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