What If Ukraine Just Took Away Russia’s Eyes?

Ukraine’s June 1 operation didn’t just destroy bombers—it may have created permanent gaps in Russia’s ability to see the war.

I use Indian media as a tactical Russian surveillance outpost—to track propaganda flows and gauge the depth of Kremlin involvement. There’s usually a low hum of coordination between the narratives pushed by Moscow’s state outlets and what filters through Indian channels.

That’s not to say Indian media is a direct arm of the Russian ultra-nationalist machine. But years of quiet cooperation have made seepage inevitable.

Key positions leak.

Signals slip out.

Case in point: Indian outlets were among the first to start echoing the Kremlin’s posture after Ukraine’s June 1 covert strike—an operation that destroyed nearly a third of Russia’s strategic bombers. Barely had the coverage of this historic raid begun when the Indian media balancing act kicked in. Stories started surfacing about how Russia would “exact revenge” in return.

That framing—revenge as inevitability—spread quickly across the global right. Within hours, it was picked up by the pro-Putin MAGA faction in the U.S., which took it a step further: Ukraine, they claimed, had humiliated Trump by keeping him in the dark about Operation Spiderweb. A key MAGA figure pushed that line—and right on cue, Indian media caught the scent and began amplifying the Trump-was-humiliated story.

Seamless coordination, right?

Not quite. The Kremlin doesn’t bark orders down the pipeline. It plants seeds. And when those seeds grow into trees—loud, ideological, self-reinforcing trees—the ecosystem takes care of itself. Support groups echo each other, amplify, distort, repeat. That’s by design.

The push behind the “revenge for Spiderweb” narrative isn’t random—it’s tactical. The operation was humiliating. A direct psychological blow. The kind that shifts the question from Can Russia win? to How vulnerable is Russia, really?

That pivot—from dominance to fragility—is dangerous for Putin. If he loses the perception that he can grind this war out indefinitely, the power balance flips fast.

Will Putin allow a two-hour call with Trump this week? And if he does, will he walk away smug?

Not a chance.

He can’t.

In just 24 hours, Ukraine blew up the Trump–J.D. Vance narrative that Kyiv had no cards left to play. All it took was five trucks loaded with $500 drones. That’s it. The image of Russian invincibility collapsed under a swarm of plastic and code.

Putin can’t afford to be seen like this.

Unlike the early 2022 period—when Ukraine sunk the Moskva, Russia’s flagship missle cruiser in the Black Sea—this time, Putin actually has options. He’s sitting on a mountain of missiles and drones. Hundreds of missiles. Thousands of drones. So yes, the odds are high that he’ll retaliate with a large-scale strike on civilian infrastructure.

Ukraine takes out military assets. Putin responds by targeting energy grids, hospitals, supermarkets—anything that serves human life.

The question is: So?

Let the hospital-destroyer keep at it. He’s been doing it since Chechnya in 2000. He did it in Georgia. He did it in Syria. And he’s been doing it in Ukraine since 2022.

According to the World Health Organization, Russia has launched 1,878 attacks on healthcare facilities, personnel, transport, supplies, and patients since the full-scale Ukraine invasion began.

Ukraine has never struck Russian military assets this deeply before. Did restraint stop Putin from bombing maternity wards? No. Did Syria’s helplessness stop him from burying Aleppo? No.

So let’s be honest: what “revenge” are we even talking about?

You’ve heard my answer. But here’s the real one—the only one that matters.

President Zelensky was asked this exact question by journalists: would Russia retaliate more viciously now? His response was blunt. Not strategic. Not emotional. Just true:

When asked by journalists whether yesterday’s operation might enrage the Russians, I responded that just a day earlier, Russia had launched a massive overnight attack on Ukraine, over 480 drones and missiles. They struck civilian infrastructure, residential buildings. There were casualties, people killed and injured.

This happens every single day. Sometimes there’s a short pause, and to be honest, we now call it a “pause” if there’s just no one killed that night. But even then, drones still fly, and people still get wounded. These so-called pauses just mean fewer attacks than usual, but we’re still talking about dozens of drones and cruise missiles.

So no, no one cares whether Russia is angry. What matters is that Russia must move toward ending this war. And as a global community, we must all do what we can to stop them.

We are very much awaiting strong steps from the United States. We hope he will support sanctions and push Putin to stop this war, at least to take the first step toward ending it: a ceasefire. These are critical things. I believe that from the position of the U.S., we will be able to achieve this faster.

That’s it. That’s the difference between a regime that bombs hospitals for theater and a state that still asks if its defense might provoke further pain.

Ukraine isn’t escalating. It’s surviving.

The missiles stockpiled in Putin’s warehouses will find their way to Ukraine—or some other country—eventually. That’s a given. But Ukraine must never start its decisions with What will Putin think?

They didn’t invade Russia. They were invaded. The only question worth asking is: Will this reduce Russia’s combat power? If the answer is yes, proceed.

It wouldn’t have been hard for Ukraine to target Russia’s civilian infrastructure. They could have easily shut down the power grid in Belgorod or Kursk. They could have plunged border towns into darkness. Could they have responded to Putin’s decision to bomb a Kharkiv supermarket in broad daylight by hitting one in Kursk?

Of course they could have.

But did they?

And did that restraint stop Putin from striking the largest children’s hospital in Kyiv? No. It didn’t. He exploits the moral boundaries of democracies—again and again.

Still, that restraint matters. And Ukraine’s focus should remain exactly where it is: Russian military power. Not one $100 drone should be wasted on anything less. Their only target should be painted in bold: combat capability.

And this time, it looks like that strategy may have paid off.

Russian military bloggers are reporting that it wasn’t just one A-50 Mainstay surveillance aircraft hit in the strike—it was two. I wouldn’t normally take them at face value. But the scale of online wailing makes me think this might actually be true.

I was still on the fence—until I saw “warplanes” in a recent New York Times piece quoting European officials.

Two A-50s. Were they hit? I don’t know. I want to believe it. I want Budanov to come out and say it clean. But he won’t. He’s not thinking about the last hit—he’s thinking about the next one.

Here’s what we do know: the Russian A-50 fleet can’t stay airborne around the clock. These aren’t drones. They need fuel, fresh crews, maintenance. Which means at some point in the cycle—maybe every shift change, maybe every rotation window—one of them has to land. And another has to take off. But with so few A-50s left, there won’t always be a one-to-one handover.

There’s going to be a gap—a blind spot in the sky.

And if Ukraine knows where and when that gap opens—they won’t just hit planes. They’ll hit the entire nervous system of Russia’s air war. That’s the window. You can’t rotate a fleet this thin without exposing it. Somewhere, sometime, the sky goes dark—and an A-50 descends into it. Slow. Predictable. Vulnerable.

If Ukraine got inside that rhythm once, they’ll be hunting for it again.

Why not turn partial blindness into total darkness?

The next A50 hit is coming.

Over to Budanov.

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