Russian Strikes on Ukraine Hit Record High in October: Ukrainian Officials

Amid the ongoing war, Russia has launched roughly 2,000 drone strikes on Ukraine in October, a record-high for the year, according to Ukrainian officials.

Early Friday, Ukraine’s General Staff of the Armed Forces reported via Facebook that Moscow launched 2,023 drone strikes on Kyiv in October—1,185 were destroyed or suppressed by Ukraine, 738 were “locally lost” and 29 flew back out of Ukraine-controlled airspace.

The General Staff did not say what happened to the remaining 71 drones. It did say, however, that since the start of the year, Russia launched 6,987 drone strikes on the Eastern European nation, mostly targeting “civilian and critical infrastructure.”

“Thanks to the professionalism and skill of the soldiers of the Defense Forces from Russian air terror managed to save thousands of lives of our people, protect hundreds of homes of Ukrainian citizens and important objects of the state from destruction,” the General Staff wrote.

Ukraine’s ministry of defense wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter, on Friday that Russia launched “a record number” of drone strikes into Ukraine.

“Ukraine needs more air defense to protect our people from russian terror,” it wrote.

In September, Russia launched 1,339 Shahed-type kamikaze drones into Ukraine, The Kyiv Independent reported, citing Ukraine’s Aire Force. Of those drones, 1,107 were struck down. Some of the other drones were jammed by electronic warfare and some flew into Russian or Belarusian airspace. There were roughly 45 drones unaccounted for.

Newsweek reached out to Ukraine’s foreign ministry via email and the Russian government via online form for comment late Saturday afternoon.

Sign Of Mass Attacks

Experts who spoke with The Kyiv Independent warned that this large amount of drone strikes could be in preparation for something much bigger.

“It’s been quite a while since we saw a large-scale missile strike, which worries me,” Fabian Hoffmann, a defense expert and doctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo in Norway, said. “Part of this could relate to the fact they are ramping up not just for one or two mass strikes, but perhaps several more with the objective of fully disintegrating Ukraine’s electrical grid within a short period of time.”

Sidharth Kaushal, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Service Institute in London, said that Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) “can be used as pathfinders.”

“A tool to force [an air defense] radar to light up, allowing the Russians to map the layout of defenses around Kyiv and other fairly well-defended cities,” Kaushal said.

Russia Wants to ‘Exploit the Cracks’

Massive attacks by Russia would devastate Ukraine as the war heads into a third winter. In February 2022, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, creating destruction and endangering civilians with its daily shelling of cities and villages.

Meanwhile, a military expert recently told Newsweek that Russian forces are likely to try to “exploit the cracks” in Kyiv’s operations in the Donetsk region near the Russian border as winter approaches.

“Despite the help and the recent mobilization actions, Ukraine is still struggling to stabilize the front and build new capabilities,” Emil Kastehelmi, an open-source intelligence expert with the Finland-based Black Bird Group, said. “The Russians likely want to exploit the cracks in the Ukrainian lines, and that’s what we’re seeing now. We’ll just have to wait and see how effectively Ukrainians are able to establish and hold the new defensive positions.”