This week, battles continued to rage along the front lines. Russia continued to pummel Ukrainian cities and towns deep in the rear with missiles and drones.
A major Russian drone attack on Kharkiv on Sunday killed four people and injured 17 others. The strike damaged a transformer substation, heating system and private homes. Kyiv and the surrounding region were the main target of a Russian attack overnight on Tuesday with seven people killed and 20 others injured in the capital. At least eight people were injured in Kyiv region. Ukraine’s Air Force said Russia used 22 missiles and 464 drones to deliver the strike. At least four drones entered the airspace of neighboring Moldova and Romania, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi said.
Some of the fiercest battles are fought in and around Pokrovsk in Donetsk region and Kupyansk in Kharkiv region. Russian forces are also making gains in the region of Zaporizhzhia.
The Ukrainian military carried out a number of successful strikes on targets deep inside Russia. On Tuesday, Ukraine struck an A-60 laser testbed aircraft in Russia’s Rostov region, a landing ship and oil refinery in the Krasnodar region. On Wednesday, it hit the VNIIR Progress plant in the Chuvashiya region that specializes in manufacturing navigation equipment used in attack drones and missiles.
Discussions around a peace plan continued throughout the week. Top U.S. and Ukrainian officials met in Geneva, Switzerland on Sunday and supposedly created an “updated and refined peace framework.” A leaked call between Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and Vladimir Putin’s senior foreign-policy adviser Yuriy Ushakov discussing Ukraine peace talks revealed that Russia is behind the 28-point plan. At the same time, Russia is reportedly rejecting the plan’s revised versions.
Russia using Shahed drones to try to hit Ukrainian aircraft midair, a defense official tells Business Insider.
Russia is using its explosive Shahed drones to hunt Ukrainian aircraft midair, a senior defense official told Business Insider, marking a new twist in Moscow’s evolving battlefield tactics. The paragraphs below are quoted from the article.
Lt. Col. Yurii Myronenko, Ukraine’s deputy minister of defense for innovation, said that Russia is constantly testing out new deep-strike capabilities, including “both new modifications of Shaheds and entirely different models.”
Myronenko, a former drone unit commander, said Russia has recently started using operator-controlled Shahed drones near the front lines, communicating with the systems through antennas in occupied regions of Ukraine, Russia, or neighboring Belarus.
“Countering such Shaheds is even more challenging, as they are piloted in real time, allowing the operator to react to the current situation and even attempt to engage our aircraft or helicopters in the air,” he said. It’s not just cutting reaction time for defenders; it is creating a whole new set of headaches.
The new tactic of gunning for aircraft with drones appears to be Moscow’s attempt to suppress Kyiv’s air defenses. Kyiv, which isn’t typically very open about battlefield losses, has not publicly disclosed any incidents in which a Russian Shahed drone took out an aircraft. But in this war, aircraft have been knocked out of the sky by drones.
Russian provinces will henceforth be assigned a “dronification” score by the country’s Ministry of Industry and Trade in an effort to boost the development of unmanned aerial vehicles across all of Russia, Defense News said early in the month.
