Ukrainian officials breathed a sigh of relief on Wednesday after Donald Trump pledged to send more weapons to Kyiv. Just hours earlier, Russia launched 728 drones and 13 missiles at Ukraine - its largest ever aerial attack.
Air defences were able to shoot down 296 drones and seven missiles while a further 415 drones were lost from radars or jammed.
President Volodymyr Zelensky described the incident as “a telling attack” that came “precisely at a time when so many efforts have been made to achieve peace”.
But this is only the latest in a streak of record-breaking aerial attacks over the past month. Below, The Independent looks at how, and why, Russia has decided to target Ukraine’s cities with such devastating force.
Attacks increased from June onwards
Russia’s aerial strikes on Ukraine have massively increased since June with intense peaks. Figures show that the five most concentrated attacks have taken place in the past month.
Last Friday, Ukraine reported 550 drones and missile strikes overnight. Before that, on 29 June, they reported 537 - the first time Russia has ever broken the 500 strike a night barrier.
In June alone, there were five instances where Russia sent over 400 drones and missiles in a night.
It follows a report from The Kyiv Independent last month which warned Russia’s drone strikes could increase to over 500 a night as it ramped up production rate of Shahed-type drones up to 70 units per day, a sharp increase from the reported 21 a day last year.
A Ukraine military-intelligence source told the publication that Moscow would soon have 12-15 new launch sites in operation.
Russia has been ‘planning increase in strikes’
Federico Borsari, a Fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), has told The Independent that the Russian army are likely to have been planning an increase in strikes for at least a year.
“There were already signs that Russia was trying to increase its output in terms of assets and platforms that they could launch against Ukraine in 2024,” he said, adding that the increase in drones is an attempt to make air raids more effective.
“Russia is trying to diversify its strike packages to make them more cost effective and achieve a scale of destruction that is sufficient to destroy key military targets such as airfields.”
He added that, for more than three years, Russia was not “very effective” when it came to “diminishing the production capacity of Ukraine at the industrial level”
The Russian army had also failed to “create a sense of panic and fear among the population in order to discredit the government and create the conditions for less efficacy on the front line,” he said.
Putin ‘trying to induce panic’ with strikes
Mr Borsari continued that Russia had been forced to be more tactical in its aims to increase damage against critical Ukrainian infrastructure, while also targeting its manpower.
“Russia is now also trying to focus on more strategic targets such as military enlistment offices, across different areas of Ukraine,” he said. “The attempt here is not just to destroy energy plants or other infrastructure, but also to instil fear and create a sense of panic among the population.
“So, increasing the psychological effects of this war on the Ukrainian population and at the same time discouraging people from basically going to enlistment offices.”
He said the psychological effects of the strikes could “diminish the ability of the Ukrainian forces to recruit”, adding: “This is certainly an issue for Ukraine compared to Russia.”
Zelensky said that the latest drone strike saw the city of Lutsk, in Ukraine’s north west, hardest hit. Lutsk is home to airfields used by the Ukrainian army, with cargo planes and fighter jets routinely flying over the city.
Analysis shows that while Moscow is increasing its drone output and ramping up the intensity of its attacks, they do not follow a consistent pattern. The day before Russia launched 550 drones and missiles at Ukraine, it sent over 52; the day after, it fired 322.
Moscow taking ‘on and off days’ approach to strikes
Marcel Plichta, a former US Department of Defense analyst, suggested that Russia was staggering its large attacks with an “on and off days” approach.
“The on day you would have a really big and increasingly a record breaking attack and then on the off day you would have... like 100 drones or 61 drones,” he explained.
“The benefit to the large attack is, in addition to the fact that it grabs headlines, it’s more likely to overwhelm Ukrainian air defence and damage the morale of the Ukrainian population.
“It’s worse to try and shoot down 500 drones at once than it is 200 drones over two nights because you suddenly have to prioritise. You have to figure out where they all are and you need to respond to them. That’s a much more challenging situation.”
Both analysts added that the escalating aerial strikes indicated a ceasefire wasn’t on the cards anytime soon, three years after Putin launched his brutal invasion of the country.
“Russia has demonstrated that they’re all in on the Shahed as a platform. They’ll tinker with it, they’ll make improvements, and they’ll introduce more complicated variants, but fundamentally they are all in on this idea of mass drone attacks to accompany their missiles,” Mr Plichta said.
“Basically from now until the end of the conflict, you’re going to see a growth in the number of Shaheds being used. Maybe patterns of their usage will change again, but this overall number used per week, per month, per year, is going to keep growing as Russia produces more and better Shaheds.”
He added: “Ultimately the thing that stops Shaheds is a political end to the conflict, not necessarily a magic weapon that can shoot down interception rate or even striking production facilities.”
Mr Borsari echoed his sentiment, saying: “It’s clear that Russia is not interested in achieving a ceasefire, at least based on the conditions that the US and Ukraine were hoping for.”
