Kyiv: Russia fired a record 728 Shahed and decoy drones at Ukraine overnight, as well as 13 cruise and ballistic missiles, the Ukrainian air force said Wednesday, in the latest escalation after weeks of mounting Russian aerial and ground attacks in the more than three-year war.
The city of Lutsk, which lies in Ukraine’s northwest along the border with Poland and Belarus, was the hardest hit, though 10 other regions were also struck, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.
Lutsk is home to airfields used by the Ukrainian army. Cargo planes and fighter jets routinely fly over the city.
Western regions of Ukraine are a crucial logistical backbone in the war, as airfields and depots there receive vital foreign military aid before forwarding it to other parts of the country. Russian long-range attacks have increasingly sought to disrupt those supply corridors.
The Russian Defence Ministry said that its forces took aim at Ukrainian air bases and that “all the designated targets have been hit.”
Russia has recently tried to overwhelm Ukrainian air defences by launching massive aerial assaults, including adding more decoy drones to its attacks.
Russia launched its previous largest aerial assault late in the night of July 4 into the following day, with the biggest prior to that occurring less than a week earlier.
Russia’s bigger army has also launched a new drive to punch through parts of the 1,000-kilometre (620-mile) front line, where short-handed Ukrainian forces are under heavy strain.
US President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he’s “not happy” with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who hasn’t budged from his ceasefire and peace demands since Trump took office in January and began to push for a settlement.
Trump said Monday that the US would have to send more weapons to Ukraine, just days after Washington paused critical weapons deliveries to Kyiv amid uncertainty over the US administration’s commitment to Ukraine’s defence.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Trump “has quite a tough style in terms of the phrasing he uses,” adding that Moscow hopes to “continue our dialogue with Washington and our course aimed at repairing the badly damaged bilateral ties.”
Zelenskyy said that the Kremlin was “making a point” with the overnight attack on western parts of Ukraine, as US-led peace efforts flounder. He urged Ukraine’s partners to impose stricter sanctions on Russian oil and those who help finance the Kremlin’s war by buying it.
“Everyone who wants peace must act,” Zelenskyy said. The Ukrainian leader was due to meet Pope Leo XIV Wednesday during a visit to Italy.
Two people were wounded in the Kyiv region during the overnight barrage, officials said, as emergency crews continued to assess the damage.
Poland scrambled its fighter jets and put its armed forces on the highest level of alert in response to Russia’s attack, the Polish Armed Forces Operational Command wrote in an X post.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warned Tuesday that Russia could pose a credible security threat to the European Union by the end of the decade. She called for defence industries in Europe and Ukraine to be ramped up within five years.
Ukraine’s air defences shot down 296 drones and seven missiles during the overnight attack, while 415 more drones were lost from radars or jammed, an air force statement said.
Ukrainian interceptor drones, developed to counter Russia’s Shahed drones, are increasingly effective, Zelenskyy said, noting that many targets were intercepted and that domestic production of anti-aircraft drones is being scaled up in partnership with some Western countries.
Western military analysts say Russia is boosting its drone manufacturing and could soon be capable of launching 1,000 drones a night at Ukraine.
“Russia continues to expand its domestic drone production capacity amid the ever-growing role of tactical drones in front-line combat operations and Russia’s increasingly large nightly long-range strike packages against Ukraine,” the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said late Tuesday.
Ukraine has also built up its own offensive drone threat, reaching deep into Russia with some spectacular long-range strikes.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said Wednesday that air defences downed 86 Ukrainian drones over six Russian regions overnight, including the Moscow region.
Flights were temporarily suspended at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport and the international airport of Kaluga, south of Moscow.
The governor of Russia’s Kursk border region, Alexander Khinshtein, said that a Ukrainian drone attack on the region’s capital city just before midnight killed three people and wounded seven others, including a 5-year-old boy.
AP
