Russia carried out its biggest drone attack on Ukraine overnight, with most of its targets located in the country’s capital, Kiev, the Ukrainian Air Force has claimed. So far, there’s been no confirmation of the aerial assault from the Russian Defense Ministry.
A total of 75 Geran-2 loitering munitions have been sent towards the Ukrainian territory, the Commander of the Air Force, Colonel General Nikolay Oleschuk, said in a post on Telegram on Saturday.
“The enemy has launched a record number of strike UAVs at Ukraine. The main direction of the attack was Kiev,” he wrote.
Videos uploaded by Kiev’s residents on social media have reportedly captured several Geran-2 drones in the air above the capital. According to some reports, there were explosions on the territory of the Borispol International Airport, some 30km east of Kiev, amid the attack.
In a separate post, the Air Force said that air defenses have also been activated in Sumy, Dnepropetrovsk, Zaporozhye, Nikolaev, and Kirovograd Regions.
Ukraine’s Energy Ministry said that 77 residential blocks and 120 institutions in Kiev were left without power as result of what it described as “a large-scale drone attack.”
According to Oleschuk, 71 of 75 incoming Russian autonomous pusher-prop drones have been shot down. Moscow had previously blamed Kiev for vastly exaggerating the number of drones and missiles that it says it’s able to destroy. In May, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Shoigu said that Ukraine claims to shoot down more missiles than Russia actually fires and that it often misidentifies the munitions used in the attacks in its reports.
Russia began widely deploying Geran-2 drones in Ukraine last fall. The relatively cheap but effective loitering munitions have been nicknamed “mopeds” because of the noise emitted by their engine.
Ukraine calls those UAVs ‘Shahed-136,’ implying that Iran makes them. Both Moscow and Tehran have repeatedly denied those assumptions. The Russian Defense Ministry insists that its Geran-2 drones are domestically produced, just like all the other hardware used in the military operation in Ukraine.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry had only confirmed sending a small batch of drones to Russia before the outbreak of the conflict with Kiev in February 2022, stressing that no new deliveries have taken place since then.