Ukraine has kept up the pressure on Russian airfields and war production in the past week after its highly successful Operation Spiderweb, which destroyed Moscow’s strategic bombers on June 1.
Russia responded with its biggest air raids on Ukrainian cities, causing dozens of civilian casualties and introducing a jet-powered version of the Iranian-designed Shahed drone.
On Friday, Ukraine struck at least three fuel tanks at Engels airbase 500km (310 miles) southeast of Moscow. Fires were also reported at Dyagilevo airbase, 170km (105 miles) from the capital. Both had been targeted in Operation Spiderweb.
Andriy Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, also said Kyiv’s forces struck the JSC Progress plant in Michurinsk, a key link in Russia’s defence industrial chain manufacturing electronic stabilisation and control systems for artillery and rocket systems.
Ukraine hit Russia’s munitions industry again on Sunday, targeting the Azot chemical plant in Novomoskovsk, which produces military explosives.
Ukrainian drones also stopped operations at the Tambov Gunpowder plant, 430km (270 miles) southeast of Moscow, on Wednesday. Kovalenko said it was “one of the main suppliers of explosives for the Russian army”, providing gunpowder for bullets, shells and rocket systems.
Geolocated footage confirmed the hit.
At the start of this week, Ukraine destroyed two fighter planes on the tarmac of the Savasleyka airbase in the region of Nizhny Novgorod east of Moscow. The planes were used to fire Kinzhal ballistic missiles, the Ukrainian military’s General Staff said.
Ukrainian drone strikes caused fires at a plant in the city of Cheboksary, 500km (310 miles) east of Moscow, which manufactures Comet antennas that provide Russian Shahed drones with resistance to Ukrainian electronic warfare. The plant also makes guidance kits retrofitted onto inertial bombs, turning them into precision-guided glide bombs.
Russia has been dropping more than 3,000 of these bombs onto Ukrainian front-line positions every month. It is key to Moscow’s ability to maintain pressure on the ground. Ukraine’s strikes against airfields and factories aim to stop these bombs’ production and delivery.
Russia reported that it downed 102 Ukrainian long-range drones on Tuesday morning.
“We have come very close to the moment when we can force Russia to stop the war. We feel it,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an ABC interview on Saturday, a possible reference to the growing effectiveness of Ukrainian long-range interdiction of Russian war production.
French Defence Minister Sebastien Lecornu said on Saturday that carmaker Renault was launching a new partnership in Ukraine to build drone production lines – a result of Kyiv’s months-long effort to attract more Western investment in domestic weapons production.
Russia strikes back
Stung by the loss of perhaps a third of its strategic bomber fleet, used to launch cruise missiles against Ukraine, Russia has scaled up its attacks.
It launched more than 1,400 Shahed drones in the past week and launched at least 59 cruise missiles.
On June 5, two Russian attacks destroyed the Kherson regional administration building. On Friday, a deadly cocktail of 407 drones and 45 missiles of various kinds killed at least four people in Kyiv and injured dozens across the country.
At least one person was reported killed when Russian bombs hit an apartment building in Kharkiv on Saturday. Kharkiv, which is only 30km (20 miles) from the Russian border, had been shelled continuously for 24 hours, Zelenskyy said. Ukraine’s air force said on Saturday that Russia had launched 215 drones across the country overnight.
Russia launched its largest yet attack of drones and missiles on Sunday night at Kyiv and Dubno in the Rivne region of Ukraine. Ukraine’s air force said on Monday that it had intercepted 479 of 499 Russian air targets. Of the 479 downed objects, 460 were drones.
On Tuesday Ukraine said it intercepted 277 out of 315 launched drones and stopped seven missiles.
A further salvo of drones targeted Kyiv on Tuesday, which reportedly included a jet-propelled version of the Shahed for the first time, capable of reaching speeds of 600 kilometres per hour (370 miles per hour). The strike targeted “Ukraine’s aviation, missile, armour and shipbuilding industries in Kyiv”, Russia’s Ministry of Defence said.
At least two people were killed in Kharkiv on Wednesday after 17 Shahed drones fell on the city.
Russia is now capable of manufacturing 2,700 Shahed drones and 2,500 decoys each month, compared with 500 a year ago, according to Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence Service, meaning that strikes of this scale and density are indefinitely sustainable.
In addition, Russia has come to an agreement with North Korea to build Harpy and Shahed-type drones, Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s intelligence community, said in an interview with The War Zone.
“This is extremely dangerous both for Europe and for East and Southeast Asia,” Zelenskyy wrote on Telegram. “This must be addressed now – not when thousands of upgraded ‘Shahed’ drones and ballistic missiles begin to threaten Seoul and Tokyo.”
Russia reaches Dnipropetrovsk
While the air war played out at these new levels of intensity, Russian troops in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region at the weekend reached the border of Dnipropetrovsk, a Ukrainian region that Russian boots had yet to step on in the more than three-year war, achieving a psychological milestone.
While Ukrainian officials said fighting was still raging in Donetsk and had not spilled over the administrative border, geolocated footage on Monday showed that the Russians had reached it.
Russian units were “developing an offensive on the territory of the Dnepropetrovsk Region”, Russia’s Defence Ministry said on Wednesday.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russian troops intended to create a buffer zone in Dnipropetrovsk, using the same argument Russia has offered for its second attempt to invade northern Ukraine’s Kharkiv and Sumy regions last year and this year, respectively.
The deputy chairman of Russia’s National Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, sought to leverage the news to diplomatic advantage on Telegram: “Those who refuse to acknowledge the realities of war at the negotiating table will face new realities on the battleground,” he wrote. “Our Armed Forces have launched an offensive in the Dnepropetrovsk region.”
EU and US pull further apart
United States Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not attend the 28th Contact Group for Ukraine on June 4, in keeping with US President Donald Trump’s freeze on aid to Ukraine, but Ukraine’s European allies did show up and pledged significant military upgrades.
Britain said it would spend $476m to build 100,000 drones for Ukraine in 2025, 10 times its drone assistance last year.
German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius announced that a long-range weapon Ukraine has been building with German funding could enter service imminently. “The first systems can be put into operation in the armed forces of Ukraine in a few weeks,” he said.
On Tuesday, the European Commission floated an 18th package of sanctions targeting Russia’s banks, energy revenues and military.
Among other things, the sanctions would forbid any transactions involving Russia’s damaged and currently inoperable Nord Stream gas pipelines. The measure would send “a clear message to global liquefied natural gas producers, which may be hesitant to expand partnerships with the European buyers as long as a relapse to Russian gas dependence is a possibility”, wrote Olga Khakova, deputy director for European energy security at the Atlantic Council.
Europe has already banned all Russian oil imports but allows tankers insured in the European Union to trade oil to third parties for up to $60 a barrel. It would now lower that price cap to $45.
The proposals also included sanctioning an additional 22 Russian banks and banks from third countries.
The oil price cap was to be discussed at the Group of Seven meeting in Canada next week. EU leaders are to approve the sanctions later this month.
“Europe remains focused on the war and, let’s say, continues to engage in militaristic bravado,” Peskov said. “There are absolutely no signals about the willingness to seek any common ground.”
Meanwhile, Hegseth told a US Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Thursday that the US would provide no military aid to Ukraine.
Source: Aljazeera
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