Russian drone strikes on Ukraine hits all-time record in July
Photo:
Sergii Volsky / AFP
Russia fired more drones at Ukraine in July than in any month since it launched its 2022 invasion, intensifying its deadly bombardment of the country, as peace talks stalled, an AFP analysis shows.
The analysis released on Friday (local time) used data published by Ukraine's air force, showing Russia fired 6297 long-range drones into Ukraine last month - up nearly 16 percent compared with June and the third straight monthly increase.
Russia also fired 198 missiles into Ukraine in July, more than in any month this year except June, according to the data.
The attacks, which trigger air raid sirens and send civilians scrambling for shelter, took place every night of the month.
The Kremlin has consistently rejected a ceasefire in Ukraine, saying it saw no immediate diplomatic way out of its nearly three-and-a-half-year invasion.
Three rounds of direct negotiation between Moscow and Kyiv since May have failed to yield a peace deal.
Russia's escalation of drone and missile attacks on Ukraine led to a three-year high in the number of civilians killed or wounded in June, the United Nations said last month.
A combined
drone and missile strike
on the Ukrainian capital Kyiv early Thursday killed at least 31 people, 28 of whom were in a nine-storey apartment block partially reduced to rubble by a missile, authorities said.
Five of the dead were children, rescue service spokesperson Pavlo Petrov said.
US President Donald Trump, who has become increasingly frustrated with the Kremlin's refusal to accept a ceasefire, has
given Moscow until next Friday
to reach a deal or face sweeping sanctions.
Footage on Russian state TV from the military channel Zvezda shows deadly attack drones being assembled in what it calls the biggest drone factory in the world.
Photo:
Zvezda / AFP
Russia has
ramped up its drone production
to an industrial scale since the war began.
Ukraine has sought to roll out new air defences in response, tasking manufacturers with producing thousands of cheap interceptor drones to destroy their Russian counterparts.
- AFP
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
RNZ News
14 hours ago
- RNZ News
Soaring food prices prove the Gaza famine is real – and will affect generations to come
By Ilan Noy of Palestinians crowd at a lentil soup distribution point in Gaza City in the northern Gaza Strip on July 27, 2025. Photo: AFP / Omar Al-Qattaa Analysis: The words and pictures documenting the famine in the Gaza strip are horrifying. The coverage has led to acrimonious and often misguided debates about whether there is famine, and who is to blame for it - most recently exemplified by the controversy surrounding a picture published by the New York Times of an emaciated child who is also suffering from a preexisting health condition. While pictures and words may mislead, numbers usually don't. The Nobel prize-winning Indian economist Amartya Sen observed some decades ago that famines are always political and economic events, and that the most direct way to analyse them is to look at food quantities and prices. This has led to decades of research on past famines. One observation is that dramatic increases in food prices always mean there is a famine, even though not every famine is accompanied by rising food costs. The price increases we have seen in Gaza are unprecedented. The economic historian Yannai Spitzer observed in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that staple food prices during the Irish Potato Famine showed a three- to five-fold increase, while there was a ten-fold rise during the Great Bengal Famine of 1943. In the North Korean famine of the 1990s, the price of rice rose by a factor of 12 . At least a million people died of hunger in each of these events. Now, the New York Times has reported the price of flour in Gaza has increased by a factor of 30 and potatoes cost 50 times more. As was the case for the UK government in Ireland in the 1840s and Bengal in the 1940s, Israel is responsible for this famine because it controls almost all the Gaza strip and its borders. But Israel has also created the conditions for the famine. Following a deliberate policy in March of stopping food from coming in, it resumed deliveries of food in May through a very limited set of "stations" it established through a new US-backed organisation (the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation), in a system that seemed designed to fail. Before Israel's decision in March to stop food from coming in, the price of flour in Gaza was roughly back to its prewar levels (having previously peaked in 2024 in another round of border closures). Since March, food prices have gone up by an annualised inflation rate of more than 5,000%. The excuse the Israeli government gives for its starvation policy is that Hamas controls the population by restricting food supplies. It blames Hamas for any shortage of food . However, if you want to disarm an enemy of its ability to wield food supplies as a weapon by rationing them, the obvious way to do so is the opposite: you would increase the food supply dramatically and hence lower its price. Restricting supplies and increasing their value is primarily immoral and criminal, but it is also counterproductive for Israel's stated aims. Indeed, flooding Gaza with food would have achieved much more in weakening Hamas than the starvation policy the Israeli government has chosen. The UN's top humanitarian aid official has described Israel's decision to halt humanitarian assistance to put pressure on Hamas as "cruel collective punishment" - something forbidden under international humanitarian law. Cormac Ó Gráda, the Irish economic historian of famines, quotes a Kashmiri proverb which says "famine goes, but the stains remain". The current famine in Gaza will leave long-lasting pain for Gazans and an enduring moral stain on Israel - for many generations. Ó Gráda points out two main ways in which the consequences of famines endure. Most obvious is the persistent memory of it; second are the direct effects on the long-term wellbeing of exposed populations and their descendants. The Irish and the Indians have not forgotten the famines that affected them. They still resent the British government for its actions. The memory of these famines still influences relations between Ireland, India and the UK, just as Ukraine's famine of the early 1930s is still a background to the Ukraine-Russia war. The generational impact is also significant. Several studies in China find children conceived during China's Great Leap Forward famine of 1959-1960 (which also killed millions) are less healthy , face more mental health challenges and have lower cognitive abilities than those conceived either before or after the famine. Other researchers found similar evidence from famines in Ireland and the Netherlands , supporting what is known as the "foetal origins" hypothesis, which proposes that the period of gestation has significant impacts on health in adulthood. Even more worryingly, recent research shows these harmful effects can be transmitted to later generations through epigenetic channels . Each day without available and accessible food supplies means more serious ongoing effects for the people of Gaza and the Israeli civilian hostages still held by Hamas - as well as later generations. Failure to prevent the famine will persist in collective memory as a moral stain on the international community, but primarily on Israel. Only immediate flooding of the strip with food aid can help now. Ilan Noy is the chair in the Economics of Disasters and Climate Change, Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington. This story was originally published on The Conversation.
NZ Herald
18 hours ago
- NZ Herald
Yemen shipwreck: At least 76 Ethiopian migrants killed, more missing
At least 76 people were killed and dozens are missing after a boat carrying mostly Ethiopian migrants sank off Yemen, in the latest tragedy on the perilous sea route, officials told AFP on Monday.
RNZ News
2 days ago
- RNZ News
The Trump administration takes a very Orwellian turn
By Aaron Blake , CNN US President Donald Trump. Photo: AFP Analysis - Back in March, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeted at the Smithsonian Institution that began as follows: "Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation's history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth." Despite the high-minded rhetoric, many worried the order was instead a thinly veiled effort to rewrite history more to Trump's liking. The order, for example, cited a desire to remove "improper ideology" - an ominous phrase, if there ever was one - from properties like the Smithsonian. Those concerns were certainly bolstered this week. We learned that some historical information that recently vanished from the Smithsonian just so happens to have been objective history that Trump really dislikes: a reference to his two impeachments. The Smithsonian said that a board containing the information was removed from the National Museum of American History last month after a review of the museum's "legacy content." The board had been placed in front of an existing impeachment exhibit in September 2021. Just to drive this home: The exhibit itself is about "Limits of Presidential Power." And suddenly examples of the biggest efforts by Congress to limit Trump's were gone. It wasn't immediately clear that the board was removed pursuant to Trump's executive order. The Washington Post, which broke the news, reported that a source said the content review came after pressure from the White House to remove an art museum director. In other words, we don't know all the details of precisely how this went down - including whether the removal was specifically requested, or whether museum officials decided it might be a good way to placate Trump amid pressure. The Smithsonian said in a statement that it was "not asked by any administration" or government official to remove content and that an updated version of the exhibit will ultimately mention all impeachment efforts, including Trump's. But it's all pretty Orwellian. And it's not the only example. Trump has always been rather blatant about his efforts to rewrite history with self-serving falsehoods and rather shameless in applying pressure on the people who would serve as impartial referees of the current narrative. But this week has taken things to another level. Last week, Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics . This came just hours after that agency delivered Trump some very bad news: the worst non-Covid three-month jobs numbers since 2010. Some Trump allies have attempted to put a good face on this, arguing that Dr Erika McEntarfer's removal was warranted because large revisions in the job numbers betrayed shoddy work. But as he did with the firing of then-FBI Director James Comey eight years ago, Trump quickly undermined all that. He told Newsmax that "we fired her because we didn't believe the numbers today." To the extent Trump did lay out an actual evidence-based case for firing McEntarfer, that evidence was conspiratorial and wrong, as CNN's Daniel Dale documented Friday. And even some Republican senators acknowledged this might be precisely as draconian and self-serving as it looked. Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, for one, called it "kind of impetuous" to fire the BLS head before finding out whether the new numbers were actually wrong. "It's not the statistician's fault if the numbers are accurate and that they're not what the president had hoped for," said Lummis, who is not often a Trump critic. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina added that if Trump "just did it because they didn't like the numbers, they ought to grow up." Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska both worried that Trump's move would make it so people can't trust the data the administration is putting out. And that's the real problem here. It's not so much that Trump appears to be firing someone as retaliation; it's the message it sends to everyone else in a similar position. The message is that you might want that data and those conclusions to be to Trump's liking, or else. It's a recipe for getting plenty of unreliable data and conclusions. And even to the extent that information is solid, it will seed suspicions about the books having been cooked - both among regular Americans and, crucially, among those making key decisions that impact the economy. What happens if the next jobs report is great? Will the markets believe it? We've certainly seen plenty of rather blunt Trump efforts to control such narratives and rewrite history before. A sampling: All of it reinforces the idea that Trump is trying to consolidate power by pursuing rather heavy-handed and blatant tactics. But if there's a week that really drove home how blunt these efforts can be, it might be this one. - CNN
