Though the knock-on effects are unclear, some military commentators have called the strike Russia's "Pearl Harbor." Hopes for direct peace talks, which resumed Monday, remain low.

The head of Ukraine's SBU sec urity service, Lieutenant General Vasyl Malyuk, said on Monday that Kyiv hit 41 aircraft, including Tu-95 and Tu-22 strategic bom bers Russia has used extensively to fire long-range missiles at Ukraine.

Costing as little as $400 apiece, Kyiv’s flying machines are successfully neutralizing sophisticated Russian equipment worth thousands of times more

Russian and Ukrainian delegates met in Istanbul on Monday for their second set of direct peace talks, a day after Kyiv launched a shock drone attack on Russia’s nuclear-capable bombers, in an operation that President Volodymyr Zelensky said was a year and a half in the making.

Delegations from the warring sides met for barely an hour and agreed to exchange more prisoners of war - focusing on the youngest and most severely wounded - and return the bodies of 12,000 dead soldiers.

The second round of talks was even shorter than the first and didn’t address any substantive issues to ending the three-year conflict.

After too many nights of pulling children from the rubble of Russian drone strikes, the weekend’s devastating attacks on Moscow’s military pride mark a brief respite for Ukrainian morale, and yet another twist of the unexpected.

Amid Ukraine's recent large-scale drone attack on Russian bombers, a new report exclusively obtained by NBC News claims Russia is deploying commercial-style drones to target civilians. NBC News' Ellison Barber interviewed a victim who says Russian soldiers targeted her,