President Zelensky threatens to attack Russia's 'weak points'.
Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky has hinted that Kyiv's forces will launch more long-range attacks targeting facilities deep within Russian territory. His army chief has also reiterated this statement.
In recent weeks, Ukraine has significantly escalated drone attacks deep into Russian territory, despite ongoing diplomatic efforts to end the conflict. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has described these actions as an attempt to derail the peace process.
In a post on his Telegram channel on June 22, Zelensky wrote that he had met with the head of Ukraine's military intelligence, Kirill Budanov, and stated that Kyiv was monitoring Russia's "key weaknesses." He pledged to "deal appropriate blows" aimed at "significantly reducing" Moscow's military potential.
Zelensky also stated that Kyiv is sharing intelligence on Russia with its Western partners and working with them to "prepare common defense solutions."
Also on June 22, speaking to reporters, the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, Aleksandr Syrsky, said that Kyiv "will increase the scale and depth" of attacks on Russian military facilities deep within its territory.
Earlier, on June 1st, Ukrainian intelligence conducted a coordinated attack on several Russian air bases across five regions, from Murmansk in the Arctic to Irkutsk in Siberia.
Ukrainian media subsequently reported that the operation, codenamed 'Spiderweb', used dozens of first-person view (FPV) kamikaze drones. At least some of these were believed to have been launched from very close to their targets, from commercial trucks secretly smuggled into Russia.
These attacks are believed to have been prepared for over a year and a half and focused on Russia's "strategic air forces."
The Defense Ministry in Moscow said that several aircraft in the Murmansk and Irkutsk regions caught fire as a result of the attack.
Kyiv claimed that the attacks damaged or destroyed around 40 Russian military aircraft, including Tu-95 and Tu-22 long-range bombers. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov later dismissed these estimates as inaccurate.
"The equipment in question... was not destroyed, but damaged. It will be restored," the diplomat told the TASS news agency in early June.
Around the same time, Keith Kellogg, President Donald Trump's special envoy, warned that "when you attack a part of an adversary's national survival system, that is, their nuclear triad... that means your level of risk increases because you don't know what the adversary will do."
