US President Donald Trump was not given a heads-up about the surprise attack on a number of Russian airfields by Ukrainian intelligence services, which reportedly destroyed more than 40 planes well within Russian territory, two senior administration officials told reporters on Sunday.
“This was purely a Ukrainian operation; the US has nothing to do with it,” one official told Kyiv Post.
Trump spent Sunday morning golfing at his property in Sterling, Virginia.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke on Sunday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, at Russia’s request.
“Secretary Rubio reiterated President Trump’s call for continued direct talks between Russia and Ukraine to achieve a lasting peace,” spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a readout of the call.
Ukraine’s security services confirmed on Sunday that they had launched a massive drone attack against five air bases inside Russia, reaching Siberia for the first time. Kyiv said that the operation, code-named “Spiderweb,” was prepared for over a year and a half “under the personal supervision” of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“An absolutely brilliant result. A result achieved solely by Ukraine,” Zelensky noted in a post on X. “Our people involved in preparing the operation were withdrawn from Russian territory in time,” he added.
The Sunday strikes came just a week after Trump lambasted Russia’s autocrat, Vladimir Putin, following days-long mass air attacks on Kyiv. However, the US President later appeared to set another two-week deadline for the Kremlin, threatening a different response if the Russian counterpart was still stringing him along.
As Kyiv Post reported last week citing two senior officials, Trump has been “seriously considering” lifting all Biden-era restrictions on Ukraine’s war effort, as he believes that the current status quo “does not serve our common interests of bringing Russia to the [negotiation] table,” as one official put it.
Several leading pro-Ukraine Republicans on Sunday hailed Ukraine’s latest operation. Congressmember Don Bacon reacted to the news by quoting a biblical passage, noting that “Putin has sown the wind and is now reaping the whirlwind.”
“The Russians were using their strategic bombers to fire cruise missiles and other weapons into Ukrainian cities. The bombers were very legitimate targets,” Bacon noted on social media.
“Russia bombs cities. Ukraine bombs military targets,” he stated.
Leading Senator Lindsay Graham, who was in Kyiv last Friday, said in a social media post that the “ever-resourceful Ukraine used creative drone warfare tactics to successfully attack Russian bombers and military assets used to kill Ukrainian citizens and destroy their country.”
“Russia indiscriminately kills men, women, and children. It’s time for the world to act decisively against Russia’s aggression by holding China and others accountable for buying cheap Russian oil that props up Putin’s war machine,” Graham noted.
“If you want this war to end, push China to help it end,” he concluded.
The US Senate is set to move ahead this week with Senator Graham’s bipartisan bill imposing more sanctions on Russia over its three-year-old war in Ukraine. The bipartisan bill was later co-sponsored by 81 senators out of 100, or a so-called “super-majority,” veto-proof at least in the US Congressional upper house.