The largest known Russian drone attack since full-scale war began in 2022 killed a woman in the Kyiv region and wounded at least three people, Ukrainian authorities said early on Sunday.
The attack comes two days after Ukraine and Russia held their first direct talks since 2022 and a day ahead of a planned phone call between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
Russia launched the 273 drones by 8am local time, targeting chiefly the Kyiv region and the Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk regions in the country’s east, Ukraine’s air force said.
The attack killed a 28-year-old woman in the capital region and wounded at least three people, including a four-year-old child.
Data provided by the air force showed this to be Russia’s largest drone attack on Ukraine of the war. On the eve of the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 23 February, Moscow launched a then-record 267 drones.
According to the air force, 128 of the drones disappeared from radar during the attack, either crashing from software failures or fuel exhaustion, or because they were decoys without explosives. Another 88 were shot down.
Both Russia and Ukraine have made increasing use of decoy drones in swarms to try to overwhelm air defences. Other decoys are designed to appear larger than they are on radar systems.
Serhii Kuzan, chair of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Centre, told the Centre for European Policy Analysis last week: “Many of the drones Russia launches against Ukraine are decoys.
“They are equipped with so-called Luneberg lenses, which increase their radar signature to appear larger, mimicking the appearance of cruise missiles or other aerial threats.”
The decoy drones, which are produced at the same factory in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone in Tatarstan that makes Shaheed-136 drones, are constructed from plywood and foam and designed to look like Shaheeds.
“Decoys force the Ukrainian defenders to shoot them down,” said Kuzan, allowing the Russians “to identify air defence locations and units that can be either bypassed or hit by follow-on strikes.”
Russia has been rapidly scaling up its drone war capacity, producing thousands of real and decoy drones to use against Ukraine.
The large scale of the attack, despite its relatively low impact, is far more significant in terms of the message it sends ahead tomorrow’s planned phone call between Putin and Trump who has demanded an “end to the bloodshed” in Ukraine.
The first direct talks in three years between Russia and Ukraine on Friday failed to broker the temporary ceasefire Kyiv and its allies had been seeking. The 100 minutes of talks in Istanbul yielded an agreement to trade 1,000 prisoners of war on each side.
President Trump said he would also speak to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Monday.
Kyiv and the region around it, as well as the eastern part of Ukraine, were under air raid warnings for nine straight hours overnight until 9am local time. Air defence units were engaged several times trying to repel attacks, the military said on Telegram.
“It’s been a tough night. The Russians have always used war and attacks to intimidate everyone in negotiations,” Andriy Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation, said on Telegram.
On Saturday, a Russian drone attack killed nine civilians by hitting a shuttle bus in the Sumy region in north-eastern Ukraine, Kyiv said. Zelenskyy called the attack “deliberate” and urged stronger sanctions on Moscow, which said it had attacked a military facility.
