As Russian troops march relentlessly forward with fierce assaults in Ukraine’s east, Moscow is unleashing a different form of terror on civilians in towns and cities: a wave of long-range drone strikes that has little precedent in the 32-month-old war.
Over the past two months, there was only one night when Russia did not launch swarms of drones packed with explosives at targets far from the front, including near-nightly attacks aimed at Kyiv, the capital.
In October, the Ukrainian military said it tracked a record 2,023 unmanned aircraft against civilian and military targets, with the vast majority shot down or disabled by electronic warfare systems.
Night after night, the explosions echo across Kyiv, with tracer fire lighting up the sky as spotlights search for the triangle-shape drones flying over residential neighborhoods.
Shots rang out once again before dawn on Thursday as air defense teams armed with heavy machine guns opened fire on drones flying over the heart of the capital. Debris rained down over businesses and apartment buildings, sparking several fires.
Though air-defense teams have limited the casualties in Kyiv — one 14-year-old girl was killed in October and more than 20 people injured, officials said — the Russians continue to unleash punishing bombardments with drones, bombs and missiles on other towns and cities across the country.
“The constant terrorist attacks on Ukrainian cities prove that the pressure on Russia and its accomplices is insufficient,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Sunday, reiterating his pleas to the Biden administration to loosen restrictions on the use of Western weapons to hit targets deep inside Russia. He also called for tougher sanctions that would prevent Russia from importing critical components for its drone and missile production.
“Ukraine deserves the same strong security as all our partners in the free world,” he said.
As Kyiv continues to plead with its allies to provide more sophisticated air-defense systems, scores of air-defense teams using heavy guns and other weapons form a chain stretching to the Russian border to combat drones as they fly in from Russia.
“It’s like bees swarming from a hive in spring to gather honey,” Senior Pvt. Yurii, 37, the leader of mobile air-defense team with the 27th Brigade of National Guard, said at the end of a 16-hour shift. Russia had directed 96 drones at targets across the country during that time.
“If we make visual or acoustic contact, we open fire,” he said, providing only his first name according to military protocol. “We use as much ammunition as we have. If we can’t handle it alone, we call for backup and another unit joins us.”
In recent weeks, he and other soldiers said, the Russians have been flying drones low to evade radar detection, frequently changing course to confuse air-defense teams, using decoy drones with no warheads to overwhelm defenses and sending surveillance drones along with strike drones to gather intelligence.
It takes about 50 rounds fired from the team’s Turkish-made Browning machine gun to take down an Iranian-style Shaheed drone, he said.
In a nearby field, golden ears of corn torn from their husks lay scattered among the broken and blackened stalks and the debris from a drone his team brought down in early October — a testament to the drones’ destructive power even when they are shot out of the sky.
A woman who gave only her first name, Khrystyna, and who lives on the 15th floor of an apartment building in downtown Kyiv, said she heard the distinctive whir of a strike drone drawing closer before dawn one recent day, like a moped speeding in her direction.
“We started getting ready to run out, and within literally five to 10 seconds, there was an explosion,” she said.
She had managed to get to an interior room before the drone crashed into her home, she said, most likely saving her life.
“My room was completely burned out,” she said, as she looked up at the charred remains of her home.
Andriy Kovalenko, a senior government official focused on Russian disinformation operations, said Moscow was seeking to use “around the clock” drone attacks to exhaust Ukraine’s air-defense systems, as well as to collect intelligence and “exert constant psychological pressure on the population in order to break the motivation to resist.”
The drone strikes are also most likely a prelude to the kind of large-scale saturation attacks using missiles and drones that have been a feature of the war, according to Ukrainian officials.
The stepped-up drone assaults are part of a deadly and unrelenting campaign that has been playing out for years as the Russians continue to try to batter Ukrainians into submission. The Kremlin is using not just drones, but also nearly every conventional weapon in its arsenal to hit both military and civilian targets.
In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, 14 people were injured on Sunday after a 1,000-pound Russian bomb slammed into a supermarket, according to Ukrainian officials. Roughly 380 buildings in Kharkiv were damaged in Russian attacks in October, Mayor Ihor Terekhov said.
The port city of Odesa came under missile attack 14 out of 31 days in October, including from ballistic missile strikes aimed at port infrastructure, Ukrainian officials said. More than a dozen people were killed in the strikes.
At least six people were killed and 16 more injured on Tuesday morning in a missile strike in Zaporizhzhia, in southern Ukraine, according to local officials.
And in Kherson, Russian soldiers are hunting Ukrainian civilians with small piloted drones laden with explosives, according to local officials. Many strikes were captured in video footage and broadcast on Russian social media channels.
Two years after the Russians were driven out of Kherson, located on the western bank of the Dnipro River, 25 people were killed and 146 others wounded in Russian attacks in October, four times as many as in the previous month, Roman Mrochko, the head of the Kherson military administration, wrote in a statement.
As the civilian toll grows, the Russian military is intensifying its offensive against Kyiv’s troops in eastern Ukraine.
Ukraine’s top military commander, Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, warned on Saturday that his forces were confronting “one of the most powerful Russian offensives” since the Kremlin ordered its full-scale invasion.
After driving Ukrainians out of Vuhledar, a former mining town that underpinned Ukraine’s defense of its southern Donbas region for years before falling at the end of September, Russian forces have been advancing at their fastest rate in years.
Just as Russia is using its advantage in manpower and equipment to gain ground in the east, it is hoping to overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses by the sheer scale of its assaults. Private Yurii said that instead of combating Russian attacks one drone or missile at a time, Ukraine ultimately must find a way to take out the Russian weapons at their source.
He recalled how his team once worked 16-hour shifts for 42 days without a break.
“They wear us down this way,” he said. “When people don’t get enough sleep, after a while, their efficiency drops.”
Some missile and drone attacks have had specific targets, like power plants and substations. But Private Yurii said it was not always clear now what the drones were aiming at. Regardless, the Russians are forcing Ukrainian air-defense teams to stay on constant alert, a key part of their strategy, he said.
“They just fly around in circles, sometimes without even a warhead, just a dummy drone, to exhaust resources,” he said.
The constant attacks cannot help but take a toll on both soldiers and civilians.
“Only a fool wouldn’t be afraid,” Private Yurii said. But over three long years of war, he said, Ukrainians have learned not to be paralyzed by fear.
“Russians still can’t come to terms with the fact that we’re still standing,” he said.
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