Russian barrage of drones and missiles hits beyond usual Ukraine targets
Still, the decoys have significant effects. Ukraine's military is forced to use its limited stockpiles of air defense missiles to counter Russia's large-scale assaults, which military experts and Ukrainian officials say are aimed at overwhelming Ukraine's air defense units on the ground. The air defense missiles are the only weapons capable of shooting down incoming missiles.
Ukraine's air force said about 90 percent of the Russian drones were intercepted, were disabled by electronic jamming, or crashed without causing damage because they were decoys. But it added that only two-thirds of the missiles that Russia fired were shot down, including just one of seven ballistic missiles. These figures could not be independently verified.
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It was unclear whether any civilians were killed during the overnight attack. But the Ukrainian air force reported the death of a pilot who crashed in his American-designed F-16 jet as he was trying to repel the Russian assault. Ukraine uses fighter jets to shoot down incoming missiles, for lack of enough ground-based air defenses.
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The air force said the pilot had shot down seven aerial targets but went down with his jet after it was damaged in the attack.
During nighttime attacks, Russia typically begins its assaults by sending waves of dozens of drones to strain Ukrainian air defenses, followed by missiles that are harder to intercept.
A report released in May by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an American think tank, said Russia had significantly ramped up its use of drones starting last fall, 'increasing from approximately 200 launched per week to more than 1,000 per week by March 2025 as part of a sustained pressure campaign.'
Given the current pace of attacks, Russia may exceed 5,000 drone launches this month, which would set a record for the conflict, said Konrad Muzyka, a military analyst at Rochan Consulting in Poland. To support these attacks, Russia has dramatically increased its production of long-range drones.
'Moscow will not stop as long as it has the capability to launch massive strikes,' Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on social media Sunday, as he called again for Ukraine's allies to increase sanctions on the Russian economy to cripple its weapons production capacities.
Zelensky has also been lobbying President Trump to let Ukraine purchase American-designed Patriot air defense systems, the only ones reliably capable of shooting down ballistic missiles. Trump suggested last week that he was open to sending more Patriots to Ukraine, although it was unclear whether he meant batteries or only ammunition, and whether these would be donated or sold.
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Russia's new campaign of air assaults on Ukraine has also come with deadly consequences for civilians.
The United Nations human rights office reported Sunday that civilian casualties in Ukraine had increased 37 percent in the period from December to May, compared with the same period the previous year, with 968 civilians killed and 4,807 injured. The majority of these casualties occurred in Ukrainian-controlled areas.
'The war in Ukraine — now in its fourth year — is becoming increasingly deadly for civilians,' Danielle Bell, head of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, said in a statement.
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