Ukraine attacks Russia with Hundreds of Drones
USA, Russia says it shot down more than 800 Ukrainian drones overnight in what appears to be among Ukraine’s largest aerial attacks on Russia, with authorities reporting at least six people killed.The two sides have escalated their air war on one another, with Ukraine increasingly firing barrages of drones at targets deep inside Russia, including warehouses and industrial plants as well as refineries.Russia’s state-run TASS News said it was the largest Ukrainian drone attack since the beginning of the year – with many of the drones targeting the Moscow area where many of Russia’s elite reside.Air defense forces and electronic warfare units shot down and neutralized 187 drones over the Moscow region, according to its governor, Andrey Vorobiev.
Ukraine has launched one of its largest drone attacks since the start of the war, causing a fire at a distribution warehouse near Moscow and killing at least six people overnight, according to Russian authorities.
The defence ministry in Moscow said it had shot down 1,478 Ukrainian drones in the past 24 hours – the highest ever total claimed – in an escalating air war in which seven Ukrainians were also killed as Russia bombed 13 locations inside the country.
A huge fire engulfed a 250,000 sq metre building near Podolsk, 25 miles south of Moscow’s city centre, belonging to the Wildberries distribution company. The facility was disabled as a result, Ukraine’s military said.Sergei Sobyanin, the mayor of Moscow, said 600 drones targeted the Moscow region overnight, of which 201 were destroyed. One person was reported killed in the region, while Ukraine said a second warehouse at nearby Domodedovo was also USA targeted.Geolocated video showed a huge fire at a Wildberries warehouse in the Moscow region, the Russian equivalent of Amazon. Vorobiev said no one was injured.
Wildberries’ warehouses have been repeatedly targeted by Ukrainian drones in recent months. Ukraine says it has struck seven out of Wildberries’ ten largest logistics centers. The warehouse struck on Sunday was 250,000 square meters, the Ukrainian military said.Kyiv has claimed that Wildberries handles supplies for the Russian military, and has stepp
The company recently announced that it would build new warehousing in neighboring Kazakhstan.One person, an 83-year-old man, was killed by a drone attack elsewhere in Moscow region on Sunday, according to Vorobiev.Drones were intercepted over 17 regions – mainly in southern and western Russia – according to the Russian Defense ministry.
Five people were killed in the Rostov region in southern Russia, according to the governor of that region.A “defense-industrial complex enterprise that produces solid rocket propellant” for various Russian weapons was struck in the attack in Rostov, according to the Ukrainian military.On Sunday, maritime risk management agency Marisks said a Greek oil tanker had been attacked while positioned at a buoy mooring near Russia’s port of Novorossiysk. The company said the vessel was hit twice and Ukraine was likely responsible. But the weapon used, extent of the damage, condition of the crew and status of the cargo remain unconfirmed.
Russia meanwhile continues to target the Ukrainian capital Kyiv with a mix of missiles and drones.
Kremenchuk and Kryvyi Rih in central Ukraine were also struck by ballistic missiles, Zelensky said. Two people were killed in Kryvyi Rih and another in Sumy in the north, Zelensky said.Thirteen employees of a steel factory in Kryvyi Rih were injured and one person died, according to Arcelor Mittal, which operates the plant. Rescue and search operations are ongoing, it said.Ukraine did not shoot down any of the ballistic missiles fired at it overnight, according to an Air Force statement, again highlighting its short supply of missiles interceptors.Russia fired more than 1,550 attack drones, nearly 1,560 guided aerial bombs and 62 missiles at Ukraine over the last week, according to Zelensky.
“European interceptors cannot simply be allowed to sit in storage. Lives need to be protected. Russia must be stopped,” he added.Elsewhere, an unidentified drone was shot down Sunday in Romanian airspace, according to the Defense ministry in Bucharest. The drone was intercepted by a Spanish F-18 fighter jet pilot on a NATO air policing mission.It was the fourth drone shot down this year over Romania, the defense ministry said.
The ministry said its radars detected the drone entering the country from neighboring Moldova. Fragments appeared to have fallen in an uninhabited area between two villages.
In July, Romanian F-16 fighter jet pilots shot down three Russian drones breaching national airspace for the first time after dozens of such incursions in the more than four years of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported that the figure was the largest daily total claimed by the defence ministry, exceeding a record that had been set only the day before, though the figure is probably exaggerated and could not be verified.
Experts said Russian numbers needed to be treated with caution but added that the scale of damage caused overnight nevertheless demonstrated how rapidly Ukraine had expanded its long-range attack capabilities in 2026.
Serhii Kuzan, the chair of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center, a thinktank, said Russian authorities “deliberately inflate their figures” to make exaggerated claims about the effectiveness of their air defence.
But he said that “against the backdrop of increased production of Ukrainian long-range drones and missiles, both the number of strikes and the scale of Ukrainian weaponry’s deployment are on the rise” as the war continues.
Kuzan argued that it was “quite possible” it was the largest-scale attack on the Moscow region, and it was “at least on a par” with the May strikes on an oil refinery in the Kapotnya area near Moscow.
Ukraine can now almost match the deep-strike capability that Russia has had since the beginning of the war using large drones and cruise missiles, though it still does not possess the high-speed ballistic missiles fired frequently by Moscow.
At the same time, both sides’ air defences are stretched to the point of near exhaustion, leading to a rise in civilian casualties and worries that the impact of the conflict beyond the immediate frontlines will only increase into the winter.
Kuzan said: “With every successful strike, Russia’s economic and military capabilities are diminished, and the Kremlin faces a new dilemma: how to counter this in a war of attrition.”
In the past month, Kyiv has shifted focus to attacking facilities linked to Wildberries, used widely by businesses to support online retail. Ukraine says the warehouses are used by the military for logistics, though they also store stock sold by large and small Russian businesses.
Ukraine’s military said on Sunday it had disabled seven out of 10 of the company’s largest warehouses in an effort to hurt the Russian economy and affect ordinary citizens financially, in a strike conducted with FP-1 drones.
A rapid development of largely homegrown technologies, including the Flamingo cruise missile and the FP-1 long-range fixed-wing drone from Fire Point, have allowed Ukraine to bomb warehouses, oil refineries, ports and military facilities up to 1,500 miles from its border.
Five people were reported to have been killed in Russia’s southern Rostov region, which borders Ukraine, and the local governor said a further 150 incoming drones had been destroyed. Ukraine said it had targeted a factory that produced rocket fuel in Kamensk-Shakhtinsky, causing a fire there.
Russian drone and missile attacks killed two people in the central city of Kryvyi Rih, while a Spanish F-18 jet shot down what appeared to be a Russia drone that had crossed over the border into Romania.
The Spanish fighter was part of a Nato patrol mission and shot down the drone at about 5am after it crossed into Romanian airspace. “The drone appears to be Russian,” a Nato military spokesperson said.
Andrey Vorobyov, the governor of the Moscow region, said the assault on the region was “one of the most massive drone attacks in recent memory”. Video footage on social media showed a fast fire raging across the Wildberries warehouse complex.
Russian attacks on Ukraine also killed two in the Sumy border region and three others across the country. A ballistic missile attack on Kyiv shortly before 3am injured six and caused several fires in the capital.A blaze caused by the attacks destroyed a large part of the Petrovka book market in the Obolonskyi district in Kyiv overnight, with some booksellers reporting they had lost their entire stock in the incident.“There is nothing. Nobody has anything left,” said Natalya, a bookstore owner who was interviewed by Ukraine’s Hromadske website. “Everything burned down. I was selling foreign language [textbooks] for schoolchildren. We were waiting for September so that everyone would have textbooks … But what happened happened.”Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, praised the work of the country’s emergency services and accused the Russians of attacking ordinary people. “Wherever the Russians can reach with their ballistic missiles, they strike civilian infrastructure,” he said in a social media post.Zelenskyy said Russia had launched more than 1,550 attack drones, nearly 1,560 guided aerial bombs and 62 missiles at Ukrainian cities and communities over the past week, most of them ballistic missiles of various types.
Ukraine launched hundreds of drones across Russia Sunday, killing at least six people in one of Kyiv's largest aerial attacks of the war.
Russia's Ministry of Defense said that it had destroyed 822 Ukrainian drones overnight. Some 600 drones were detected headed toward the Russian capital, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said, with a third of those destroyed over the Moscow region itself.
An 83-year-old man was killed after a Ukrainian drone hit a private home in the Moscow region, local Gov. Andrey Vorobyov said. He also confirmed that a Ukrainian attack had sparked a blaze at a Wildberries warehouse in the town of Podolsk.
A drone attack targeted three towns in Russia's southwestern Rostov region, killing five people, local Gov. Yury Slyusar said. The attack, with more than 150 drones, damaged several homes and a railway station and sparked a forest fire.
Kyiv has stepped up its attacks on Russia this year, with long-range missiles and swarms of drones increasingly targeting military industries and energy facilities. It has also increasingly pummeled giant Wildberries depots, burning billions of dollars' worth of merchandise belonging to the Russian online retail giant and bringing the war home to the Russian public nearly four and half years into Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
A Russian missile attack on Ukraine's Kryvyi Rih killed two people and wounded 14 others, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on social media Sunday. He also said that one more person had been killed in the city of Sumy.
Elsewhere, a man and a woman both died when their home was hit by a Russian strike in Ukraine's southern Zaporizhzhia region, said Ivan Fedorov, the head of the local military administration.
"Wherever the Russians can reach with their ballistic missiles, they strike civilian infrastructure," Zelenskyy said. "Since this morning, air raid alerts have continued in many regions - the Russians launched another wave of drones."
Russia's Ministry of Defense said Sunday that it had targeted a metallurgical plant in Kryvyi Rih and several military-industrial sites in Kyiv, including a manufacturing facility for Ukraine's Flamingo missiles.Though Ukraine is effective at 
stopping slower-moving drones, it has little to no defence against high-speed ballistics, its stock of US-made Patriot interceptor missiles – the only weapons capable of knocking them out – having been run down.Tens of millions have placed their trust in the Guardian’s fearless journalism since we started publishing more than 200 years ago, turning to us in moments of crisis, uncertainty, solidarity and hope. More than 1.5 million supporters, from 180 countries, now power us financially – keeping us open to all, and fiercely independent. Will you make a difference and support us too?
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Posted on 2026/08/17 09:19 AM