Ukraine’s military overnight on Monday-Tuesday shot down or disabled hundreds of incoming Russian missiles and drones in a distinct air defense victory, with recent European-financed deliveries of high-tech interceptor missiles playing a key role in that success, data published by the Ukrainian Air Force (UAF) on Tuesday showed.
The Kremlin on the night in its fifth major mass strike targeting Ukraine’s power grid and civilian heating infrastructure since early December launched a detected 373 attack weapons, among them 339 Iranian-designed Shahed kamikaze drones, 18 Iskander-M or S-300 ballistic missiles, 15 bomber-launched, low-flying Kh-101 cruise missiles and a single Zirkon anti-ship missile, a UAF statement said.
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Ukrainian air defenses in some six hours of engagements in airspace mostly above the central and northern regions of the country – though not stopping the Russian assault completely – bit deeply into the waves of Russian robot aircraft and missiles, shooting down or suppressing 342 total of all types, official counts said.
The Ukrainian score against the most dangerous and difficult-to-intercept weapons – ballistic missiles flying at up to five times the speed of sound and carrying warheads containing close to a ton of high explosives – was the biggest success of the night and a visible reversal of relatively porous air defense operations just a week before.
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Of the 18 ballistic missiles launched by Russia from sites inside the Russian Federation or in the occupied Ukrainian territory, according to the UAF count, 14 were destroyed by ground defenses: a shoot down rate of 77 percent.
Russian losses in high-tech, terrain-hugging cruise missiles were equally Moscow-painful: Of the 15 dropped by bombers from airspace over the Caspian Sea or central Russia, only two made it past Ukrainian air defenses to hit targets, for a shoot down rate of 86 percent. Only a week earlier, during the previous major Russian drone and missile strike on Ukraine, a smaller Kremlin attack was two or three times more effective. Of 18 ballistic missiles launched by Russia against Ukrainian homes and businesses overnight on Jan. 12-13, Ukrainian air defenses only managed to stop two for a shoot-down rate of 11 percent.
Ballistic missiles and cruise missiles that night pounded the cities of Kyiv, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro, Odesa, Sumy, Kharkiv, and Zhytomyr.
Energy generation and power substations were heavily targeted and hundreds of thousands of residents of the capital Kyiv region were left without power, in some cases for two days, amid -15°C temperatures.
Missile hits also demolished a logistics terminal in Kharkiv, killing four, and left 46,000 families without power in Odesa. The Kremlin strikes also hit educational buildings, railroad infrastructure, and port facilities.
Russian attack plans a week later were equally ambitious but, overnight on Monday-Tuesday, far less effective, with only two to four ballistic missiles launched by Russian Federation forces able to reach targets in the Kyiv region, the epicenter and main focus of the night’s attacks, and only one or two ballistic missile reaching the vicinity of the secondary target city of Vinnytsia, tracking data published by the air war watch group PPO Radar on Tuesday showed.
President Volodymyr Zelensky during a joint press conference with Czech President Petr Pavel on Jan. 16 said that in past weeks Ukrainian air defenses had been dangerously short and in some sectors completely out of critical ammunition for air defense weapons, particularly interceptor missiles. That ammunition shortage had not been remedied until “just this morning,” the Ukrainian leader said.
In the hours following the Jan. 17-18 overnight attacks, Zelensky told Kyiv reporters recent deliveries of critically-needed interceptor missiles had “helped significantly” in the night’s air battles.
Senior Russian officials led by Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin have claimed Russia wishes no harm to Ukrainian civilians. The view of official Kyiv and most Ukrainian civilians is that those Russian officials are not telling the truth.
In rough numbers, according to open source and Ukrainian Air Force counts, during 2025 the Russian Federation launched between 50,000 and 55,000 attack drones, 1,000 to 1,500 cruise missiles, and 500 to 800 ballistic missiles against targets inside Ukraine – mostly civilian.
With more than 50 nations having donated or sold military equipment to Ukraine since Russia’s February 2022 full-scale second invasion of the country, the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) for air defense operates weapons ranging from World War One-era machine guns to US-made Patriot systems firing the PAC-3 interceptor missile, and French-Italian SAMP/T system firing the Aster missile.
Of all the weapons in the Ukrainian inventory only one – the made-in-the-US Patriot firing the battle-tested PAC-3 interceptor – is both capable of shooting down a ballistic missile and produced in quantity.
The Kremlin, in late December, kicked off a long-awaited blitz of bombardment attacks against Ukraine’s power grid and heating infrastructure with the probable objective of ending the Russo-Ukraine War on Russian terms, by pushing Ukrainian voters sufficiently to pressure the Ukrainian national leadership to stop resisting Russian invasion.
Timed to hit during the holiday season for maximum effect against Ukrainian morale, six major overnight attacks have been launched by the Kremlin since early December: on Dec. 5-6, on Dec. 22-23, Dec. 26-27, Jan. 12-13 and Jan. 17-18.
The first attack was the biggest of the entire war with 51 missiles and 653 drones launched. That and the almost-as-big Dec. 26-27 strikes (519 drones and 40 missiles) centered primarily on the Kyiv capital with secondary strikes against regional centers of Odesa, Dnipro, Cherkasy and Volyn.
A Ukrainian military source told Kyiv Post shortages of PAC-3 interceptor missiles needed by Ukrainian Patriot systems operators to engage ballistic missiles, and AIM-120 and AIM-9 air-to-air missiles needed by Ukrainian fighter pilots to engage incoming cruise missiles already were apparent by mid-December.
In a recent video published by the Ukrainian Air Force a technician working on Ukrainian F-16 fighters said that those aircraft would fly more often and score more Russian cruise missile kills, if the Ukrainian military were able to receive bigger delivery volumes of air-to-air missiles.
The Trump administration in late February stopped donated arms deliveries to Ukraine after the White House shifted foreign policy to align more closely with Russia. In July, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Washington media the Pentagon would limit even sales of US weaponry to Ukraine, including Patriot interceptor missiles, because of shortages in the US arsenal.
Based on recent US procurement figures, the price of a single PAC-3 missile purchased by Ukraine’s allies from the US to defend Ukrainian skies from Russian ballistic would cost about $4 million, plus a 10 percent “special markup” fee imposed by Trump.
Trump in a Jan. 7 TruthSocial post accused Raytheon, the PAC-3/Patriot manufacturer, of not gearing up for expanded production and instead paying big dividends to shareholders.
There was no immediate public response from the corporation. Over the past twelve months the value of Raytheon stock has increased by about 66 percent, with about half of those gains coming in the past six months.
