A third Russian airfield was set on fire in a drone attack on Tuesday, a day after Ukraine demonstrated an apparent new ability to penetrate hundreds of kilometers into Russian airspace by attacking two Russian air bases, Reuters reported.

Officials in the Russian city of Kursk, located in northern Ukraine, released images of black smoke over the airfield early Tuesday after the latest strike. The governor said an oil storage tank caught fire but there were no casualties.

It came a day after Russia confirmed it had been hit by Soviet-era drones hundreds of kilometers from Ukraine – at Engels Air Base, home to Russia’s strategic bomber fleet, and in Ryazan, a few hours’ drive from Moscow.

Kyiv did not directly take responsibility for these strikes, but nevertheless noted them.

“If Russia regards these incidents as deliberate attacks, it will likely view them as some of the most significant air defense failures since its invasion of Ukraine,” the British Ministry of Defense said on Tuesday.

The New York Times, citing a senior Ukrainian official, said the drones involved in Monday’s attacks were launched from Ukrainian territory, and at least one of the attacks was carried out with the help of special forces near the base.

Ukraine has never publicly acknowledged responsibility for attacks from inside Russia. Answering questions about the strikes, Defense Minister Oleskyi Reznikov repeated an old joke, blaming cigarettes for carelessness. “Very often Russians smoke in places where smoking is prohibited,” he said.

Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Ukraine’s president, went further, noting that Engels is the only Russian base fully equipped for the fleet of giant bombers that Moscow has used to attack Ukraine.

“They (strategic aircraft) will try to disperse them on airfields, but this complicates the operation against Ukraine. Yesterday, thank you their unsuccessful smokingwe achieved a very high result,” he said.

The damage to the warplanes has also sparked outrage among Russian military bloggers, whose social media posts can provide a window into Russia’s state of mind about the conduct of the war.

“And I, a naive and stupid civilian, thought that during the war planes were kept under concrete shelters, right?” Vladlen Tatarskyi wrote. “It appears that small drones, the dangers of which have been so neglected, can attack strategic aircraft,” he wrote.

The huge Tupolev long-range bombers that Russia deploys at Engels are an important part of its strategic nuclear arsenal, similar to the B-52s deployed by the United States during the Cold War. Russia used them in its October campaign to destroy Ukraine’s power grid with near-weekly waves of missile strikes.

The Engels base, located near the city of Saratov, is at least 600 km from the nearest territory of Ukraine.

On the same topic:

• Attacks on Russian air bases will have a great psychological impact – Western officials