Putin said ‘he will have to respond’ to Ukraine’s drone attack on Russia’s airfields, Trump said.
President Donald Trump said on June 4 that he spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin about the Russia–Ukraine conflict during a phone call that lasted more than an hour.
“We discussed the attack on Russia’s docked airplanes, by Ukraine, and also various other attacks that have been taking place by both sides,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “It was a good conversation, but not a conversation that will lead to immediate Peace.”
Trump added that Putin indicated to him that Russia will “have to respond to the recent attack” on Russian airfields that Ukraine confirmed over the past weekend.
Ukraine launched a large-scale drone attack targeting Russian bases deep inside the country over the weekend in a move that surprised Moscow. The bases, some of which were located as far as Siberia, hosted bombers that are capable of delivering nuclear weapons.
Ukrainian officials have said that more than 40 bombers, or about a third of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet, were damaged or destroyed in attacks on June 1. Russia disputed the figure and said that only a few planes were hit in the strikes.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy hailed the attack as a “brilliant operation” that took more than “a year and a half” to carry out, according to a post on social media platform X.
“In total, 117 drones were used in the operation with a corresponding number of drone operators involved,” he said, adding that 34 percent “of the strategic cruise missile carriers stationed at air bases were hit,” referring to nuclear-capable bombers.
In a statement posted on the social media app Telegram on June 1, the Russian Ministry of Defense acknowledged the attack but described it as a “terrorist attack using FPV drones against airfields in the Murmansk, Irkutsk, Ivanovo, Ryazan and Amur regions.”
Russian officials added that aircraft caught fire in the Murmansk and Irkutsk areas because of drones that had been launched from “the immediate vicinity of the airfields,” according to a translated statement.
