Ukraine sent waves of drones to attack power plants, oil refineries and other sites across Russia, including in Moscow, before dawn on Sunday, Russian authorities and news media said, in what appeared to be part of a ferocious battle being waged by both sides against each other’s energy facilities.
The Russian military characterized the assault as one of the largest since it launched its full-scale invasion against Ukraine two and half years ago, and it claimed to have shot down all 158 drones launched by Ukrainian forces across 15 regions.
However, Russian state media and local officials reported fires and explosions caused by drone attacks at a number of facilities, including an oil refinery in Moscow and one of the largest energy production facilities in the central Russian region of Tver.
Many of the drones were directed at targets in the regions of Kursk, Bryansk, Voronezh and Belgorod, all of which border Ukraine, according to the Russian military. The reports by Russian officials could not be independently verified.
Ukrainian officials did not immediately comment on the attacks. But the Ukrainian military has repeatedly targeted Russian oil and gas facilities in what it has said is an effort to undermine Russia’s ability to supply its forces with fuel and cut into the energy revenues that fund the Kremlin’s war effort.
It is difficult to assess the effect of the overnight attacks or the overall Ukrainian campaign. As the number of Ukrainian strikes has increased, Moscow has increasingly limited the information it releases on its oil industry.
Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service completely stopped publishing data on the production of oil products in the country this past week.
While Kyiv has been attacking oil facilities for months, the campaign has yet to have a demonstrable effect on the fighting inside Ukraine, where Russian forces have made steady gains throughout the summer in the eastern Donbas region.
The Russian advance in the direction of Pokrovsk, a vital logistics hub, threatens to undermine Ukraine’s ability to supply its forces across a broad swath of the front line.
And even as Ukraine steps up its strikes inside Russia, they still pale in comparison to the destruction wrought by Russian attacks on Ukrainian towns and cities since the war began in February 2022. Moscow has directed around 10,000 missiles, 14,000 long-range attack drones and 33,000 guided bombs at targets across Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian military.
More than half of Ukraine’s energy-generating capacity has been affected by Russian strikes, and energy officials have warned that millions of Ukrainians will face a difficult winter.
Given the advantages Russia holds both in terms of troop numbers and firepower, Kyiv has been employing a variety of asymmetric strategies.
These include an offensive into the Kursk region of western Russia, grabbing hundreds of square miles of territory in a matter of weeks in an effort to force Moscow to pull resources from the Ukrainian front to defend its own land. So far, the Kremlin appears determined not to redeploy elements of the military engaged in offensive operations.
Ukrainian leaders have said their efforts to undermine the Russian war effort have been hampered by restrictions on the use of long-range weapons provided by its allies to hit targets inside Russia.
Ukraine’s defense minister, Rustem Umerov, traveled to Washington over the weekend to press the Biden administration to lift the restrictions, presenting senior officials with a list of military sites Ukraine would like to hit as soon as the ban is lifted.
Ukraine is also desperate to find a way to limit Russia’s ability to unleash powerful guided bombs from warplanes that can be deployed from the relative safety of the skies above Russia by attacking the airfields where the aircraft begin their bombing runs.
“I appeal to the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany: We need the abilities to really and fully protect Ukraine and Ukrainians,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday. “We require both: permissions for long-range use, and your long-range shells and missiles.”
At the same time as Kyiv presses its allies for support, Ukraine has been busy developing its own domestically produced long-range weapons. And Mr. Zelensky said last week that Ukraine had carried out a successful test of the first domestically produced ballistic missile.
He also recently announced the development of a “new class” of a domestically produced, long-range strike weapon — a drone powered with a rocket engine that has been given the name Palianytsia.
But the weapons are still in the early stages of development, and Kyiv still has to largely rely on its expanding fleet of slow moving, fixed-wing drones to hit targets deep inside Russia.
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