Their small, revving motors sound like motorcycles in the sky. Over the weekend, they streaked into Ukraine by the hundreds.
The drones fired by Russia. along with missiles, appeared to carry a message. Moscow’s barrages are often timed for geopolitically significant moments and aimed at symbolic targets, Ukrainian and European officials and analysts say.
The goal is to strengthen Moscow’s hand in talks, analysts say, and so far the Kremlin has paid no cost in additional U.S. sanctions as it escalates its attacks.
The latest such assault came on Sunday, when a Russian ballistic missile punched a hole in the roof of Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers building, the Kremlin’s first strike on the governmental center of Kyiv in three and a half years of war. The strike set the upper three floors aflame, in what was part of the largest single volley of missiles and drones fired in the war.
The attack came just three days after European heads of state gathered in Paris to consider sending troops to Ukraine after a cease-fire or peace settlement. Their mission, in part, would be to protect the Ukrainian government. Russia’s barrage appeared to signal that such troops would be at risk.
“This is a clear sign that Putin is testing the world,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said of the attack, which he said appeared intended to gauge whether other nations “will accept it or put up with it.”
Mr. Zelensky was not alone in finding the timing suspicious.
“Every Russian attack is a deliberate choice and a message: Russia does not want peace,” said Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief.
Analysts have linked major attacks to important geopolitical events, such as phone calls between President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and rounds of direct Russian and Ukrainian negotiations this year in Istanbul.
The Institute for the Study of War, a U.S.-based think tank, has found that Russia fires larger numbers of drones and missiles preceding or following such events, suggesting that Russian strategists see a diplomatic signaling role in the attacks, even as civilians are routinely killed.
An analysis by The New York Times of Russian strike data from the Ukrainian military shows that after five of the six phone calls between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin from February to July this year, Russia fired larger-than-average barrages at Ukraine, sometimes dramatically so.
The day after a call on July 3, for example, Russia launched 550 drones and missiles. That volley was far above the average of 118 munitions launched by Russia per day in the first six months of this year.
Mr. Trump has himself addressed the timing of Russian strikes. After one phone call with the Russian president, Mr. Trump said, referring to his wife, Melania: “I go home, I tell the first lady, ‘You know, I spoke to Vladimir today, we had a wonderful conversation.’ She said, ‘Oh, really? Another city was just hit.’”
Before the latest negotiations over the war commenced, military analysts warned that peace talks might usher in a bloodier phase of the war. The two armies, they said, might jockey for position before front lines are frozen, and the two governments might try to gain leverage at the negotiating table.
In this light, Russia’s drone war seems an all but open dare to Mr. Trump to respond. On Sunday, the president said he planned to call Mr. Putin within several days and to meet with European leaders in Washington to continue efforts at ending the war.
The American Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said on Sunday that the Trump administration was prepared to “increase pressure” economically on Russia to get it to negotiate, but added that European countries also needed to apply more force. Europe is planning a new round of sanctions against Russia, while Mr. Trump has so far not followed through on his threats to increase direct economic penalties against Moscow.
Ukraine, too, has seemingly timed at least one major strike to talks.
In March, the Ukrainian Army launched its largest drone barrage yet at Moscow the evening before a bilateral meeting with the United States in Saudi Arabia. At that meeting, Kyiv announced that it would accept an immediate, unconditional cease-fire, a proposal that Russia has rejected.
But Russia has far more drones and missiles to shoot, having brought online two new drone factories over the past year, greatly expanding production capacity.
The Kremlin has launched multiple major volleys or strikes on symbolic targets closely timed to security conferences and diplomatic meetings.
The evening before the opening of the Munich Security Conference in February, Russia launched a drone at the stainless-steel shield that contains radiation from the defunct Chernobyl nuclear energy plant, blowing a hole in it. Ukrainians interpreted it as a warning to Europe that arming Ukraine risked more war and a disaster in which radiation could blow westward again, as it did in the 1986 Chernobyl explosion.
On Thursday, as European leaders met in Paris to consider sending troops to Ukraine, a Russian missile killed two members of a Danish Refugee Council demining team. Mykhailo Samus, the director of the independent New Geopolitics Research Network in Kyiv, said he saw the strike as a warning against deploying European troops.
Last month, after Mr. Trump met with Mr. Putin in Alaska and separately with European leaders and Mr. Zelensky at the White House, Russian missiles hit an American-owned factory and diplomatic buildings of the European Union and the British Council in Kyiv.
On Monday, the Ukrainian authorities said that the Cabinet of Ministers building had taken a direct hit from a Russian ballistic missile. Immediately after the strike, Kyiv’s mayor suggested that the fire had been caused by falling drone debris.
“Putin knows what he is doing,” Katarina Mathernova, the E.U. ambassador to Ukraine, wrote on Facebook. Ms. Mathernova, who toured the site on Monday, said, “Putin is deliberately targeting the country’s lifelines — its government, its energy, its people.”
Maria Varenikova contributed reporting from Kyiv, and Yurii Shyvala from Lviv, Ukraine.
Andrew E. Kramer is the Kyiv bureau chief for The Times, who has been covering the war in Ukraine since 2014.
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