Ukraine’s shock drone attack on Russian military air bases, including some deep inside Russian territory, which President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said was secretly planned and coordinated from inside Russia over the past 18 months, seemed on Monday to have left the Kremlin speechless.
Russia’s state-run media cited the country’s defense ministry as saying Monday that forces had struck Ukrainian drone production, launch and storage sites, and claiming to have shot down hundreds of Ukrainian-launched drones over the past 24 hours, but there was no direct public response from Russian authorities to the Ukrainian strike.
While Ukraine has launched drones at Russia, including the capital Moscow, for months, as well as staging other covert operations on Russian soil, the attack on Sunday was notable for its scope and scale. Ukraine claimed it had damaged or destroyed 41 Russian bomber aircraft at bases across the vast country. Ukrainian officials said the attack did not endanger any Russian civilians.
It was also notable for its timing, a day before the two sides sat down face-to-face in Turkey for a second round of direct talks.
The head of Ukraine’s SBU intelligence agency said in a statement on Tuesday that Russia “thought that it could bomb Ukraine and endlessly kill Ukrainians with impunity. But that is not the case. We will respond to Russian terror and destroy the enemy everywhere — at sea, in the air, and on land.”
Social Media/via REUTERS 
SBU chief Vasyl Maliuk claimed in the statement that Ukraine had hit aircraft at four Russian bases, inflicting more than $7 billion worth of damage on Russia’s bomber fleet.
The Ministry of Defense in Moscow said Monday that Russia’s air defenses had intercepted a total of 316 Ukrainian drones in 24 hours, which encompasses the time of Ukraine’s attack. The Russian ministry said 205 of those drones were hit outside the “special operation zone,” a term the Kremlin uses to refer to land it has seized since launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Ukrainian authorities said that, before dawn on Monday, Russia launched two ballistic missiles and a series of drones at the northeast city of Kharkiv, just miles from the Russian border, wounding at least six people, including a child.
Separately, Russia’s military claimed more than 1,400 Ukrainian troops were killed in northern Ukraine over the preceding day.
Russia and Ukraine hold 2nd round of talks in Turkey
Despite the sharp escalation in the war making any breakthrough appear even less likely than it had before, Russian and Ukrainian delegations did sit down opposite each other Monday in Istanbul for the second round of negotiations in a bid for peace.
Ukraine’s representatives, led by Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, were expected to present a plan demanding a “full and unconditional ceasefire in the sky, on land and at sea as a necessary background and prerequisite for peace negotiations,” the Reuters news agency said, citing a text of the Ukrainian proposal it had viewed. The proposed truce would last a minimum of 30 days, in line with calls made by the Trump administration previously.
Handout/Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs/Getty 
Ukraine was also expected to demand the unconditional return of all Ukrainian children and civilian hostages taken during the war, and that territorial gains made by Russia since February 2014, when Russia first invaded and illegally annexed the Crimean Peninsula, not be recognized by the international community.
In return, Ukraine is open to the lifting of “some sanctions” imposed against Russia by the U.S. and its allies, “but in stages and only gradually, with a mechanism for resuming sanctions if necessary.
The Ukrainians also want Russian sovereign assets frozen by Western nations to be used for reconstruction, or to remain frozen until reparations are paid.
Moscow did not, going into the second round of talks on Monday, reveal any new conditions or terms for a hypothetical ceasefire.
President Vladimir Putin’s government has insisted for months that the only way to end the war is to address what it vaguely calls the conflict’s “root causes.” Russia insists the war, which Putin calls only a “special military operation,” was caused by NATO’s ambitions for further eastward expansion, and by Moscow’s desire to defend Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the eastern part of the neighboring nation.
Putin and his senior aides routinely dismiss pro-Europe, pro-NATO Zelenskyy as an illegitimate leader of Ukraine. The Russian president has refused to accept his Ukrainian counterpart’s challenge to hold direct personal talks, face-to-face.
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said Monday as the talks got underway that discussions over such a Putin-Zelenskyy meeting “will be considered.”
But there was no confirmation from either Ukraine or Russia that such a high-level dialogue was imminent. Instead, reports from Turkey suggested the second round of talks had concluded in just over an hour. Zelenskyy, who did not attend the negotiations, told reporters during a visit Monday to Lithuania, however, that a new prisoner swap between the warring sides was being organized.
He did not say how far the planning for a swap had gone, but a significant exchange late last month of about 1,000 captured civilians and prisoners of war was the only tangible result of the first round of talks between Russia and Ukraine.
President Trump has voiced frustration with both Zelenskyy and Putin for failing to agree to a truce. During last year’s election campaign, Mr. Trump vowed repeatedly to broker an end of the war within hours of taking office. The U.S. president recently issued rare sharp criticism of Putin, calling him “absolutely crazy” for continuing to hammer Ukrainian cities with missiles as the U.S. and its partners push for a peace agreement.
Mr. Trump wondered in a social media post during the last prisoner swap whether it, “could lead to something big?”
Russian officials were quoted by the country’s state-run media as saying the two sides agreed on Monday to hold a third round of talks, but no date was set. The officials acknowledged that future prisoner swaps had been a key point of discussion, but Ukrainian officials said Russia had rejected the call for a broader 30-day ceasefire.
There was no immediate reaction from the White House to the second round of negotiations in Turkey on Monday, but the Trump administration did make it clear that Ukraine had given no advance warning of the Sunday drone attack ahead of those talks.