These are the key events on day 1,194 of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Here’s where things stand on Monday, June 2:
Fighting
- Ukraine said it destroyed Russian bombers worth $7bn at airbases as far away as Siberia, in an attack that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called Kyiv’s “longest-range operation”.
- Al Jazeera’s Dorsa Jabbari, reporting from Moscow, said the “simultaneous large-scale attack” was “launched from inside Russia” and targeted “Russian planes that have been carrying out attacks on Ukraine”.
- An official at Ukraine’s SBU intelligence service told the Reuters news agency that the operation involved hiding explosive-laden drones inside the roofs of wooden sheds and loading them onto trucks, which were driven to the perimeter of the airbases. At least 41 Russian warplanes were hit, they said.
- Russia’s TASS news agency said there were no military or civilian casualties and that “some of the participants” had been detained.
- The operation came as Ukraine’s Air Force said Russia had launched 472 drones at the country overnight, in the highest nightly total of the war. Moscow also launched seven missiles.
- This included a missile attack on a Ukrainian military training ground that killed 12 soldiers and wounded more than 60 on Sunday morning, according to Ukraine’s Ground Forces.
- The assault led Ukrainian Ground Forces commander Mykhailo Drapatyi to announce his resignation, saying he felt a “personal sense of responsibility” for the soldiers’ deaths.
- Meanwhile, in Russia, at least seven people were killed and 69 injured when a bridge in the Bryansk region, which borders Ukraine, collapsed onto a passing passenger train. Moscow Railway, in a post on Telegram, said the bridge had collapsed “as a result of an illegal interference in the operation of transport”.
- A second bridge collapse caused a freight train to derail in Russia’s Kursk region, which also borders Ukraine, injuring a train driver, according to the acting governor of the area.
- A Ukrainian drone attack on Kursk also sparked fires after debris from destroyed drones fell on private homes, the acting governor said.
Politics and diplomacy
- Zelenskyy confirmed that Ukraine was sending a delegation led by Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov to a second round of peace talks, which are set to begin today in Istanbul, Turkiye.
- Vladimir Medinsky, a former cultural minister who will lead Russia’s delegation in Istanbul, said Moscow has received Ukraine’s “version of the memorandum on a peaceful settlement”, the TASS news agency reported.
- However, Zelenskyy said that Russia has yet to share its own memorandum. “We don’t have it, the Turkish side doesn’t have it, and the American side doesn’t have the Russian document either,” the Ukrainian president said in a post on X.
- TASS reported that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his United States counterpart, Marco Rubio, spoke by telephone about “several initiatives aimed at a political solution to the Ukraine crisis”, including Monday’s talks.
- An exit poll in Poland’s presidential run-off shows the two candidates are very close and that the race is still too close to call, in an election where aid to Kyiv, Ukraine’s potential membership of NATO and Ukrainian refugees were key issues.
