Ukraine Fends Off Fresh Wave of Drone Attacks on Kyiv

Ukrainian air defenses repelled a wave of Russian strikes in Kyiv on Wednesday, knocking at least 13 drones out of the sky, with explosions reported in the historical center of the city.

Russia has increasingly reverted to the use of its Iranian-made drones after receiving what was likely a new shipment of them earlier this month. Even after Ukraine shot down the first shipment, Iranian officials were carrying out training on their Mohajer and Shahed 136-series drones in Crimea, Ukrainian officials said.

Debris from the destroyed drones caused damage to government buildings in the Kyiv region and apartments in the center of the capital. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukrainian air defenses had managed to shoot down the entire party of unmanned aerial vehicles.

No injuries were reported.

The drones help Russia to maintain its pressure on Ukrainian infrastructure by providing a cheaper alternative to Moscow’s cruise missiles, stockpiles of which have also been driven down by months of attacks.

The attack came hours after U.S. officials said the Biden administration was completing plans to give Ukraine a Patriot missile-defense system to help protect against Russia’s strategy of grinding down Ukraine’s power-grid capabilities during freezing winter temperatures while damaging other critical infrastructure that has caused water outages.

The number of systems was unclear, but Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin could sign the directive providing the Patriot as early as this week, the officials said.

Late Tuesday, presidential spokesman Andriy Yermak, together with Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov and Ukraine’s top military commander, Lt. Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhny, had a phone call with U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan to discuss security as well as economic and humanitarian support for Kyiv.

Russia’s failure to secure meaningful political or military victories in the invasion it launched in February this year has caused anxiety in Moscow. The U.K. Ministry of Defense highlighted comments by Igor Girkin, a former Russian militant commander, on a recent visit to troops in Ukraine’s occupied Donbas region. He pointed out problems with strategic goals and motivation in Donbas, where Moscow has redeployed troops following its withdrawal from the southern region of Kherson last month.

“Factional tensions likely extend to the top of Russia’s military hierarchy,” the ministry said.

The drone attacks on Kyiv came as Russian forces worked to push forward in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. Those troops have largely gathered around the city of Bakhmut, where ongoing Russian attempts to break Ukrainian defensive lines have given Moscow’s forces small gains on the eastern outskirts of the city, according to Russian military correspondents.

Ukrainian forces have continued to hit targets deeper inside Russian-occupied territory with precision artillery, and the Ukrainian General Staff said Wednesday that it had hit a group of 15 soldiers in the Luhansk region and destroyed a Russian arms depot in the Zaporizhzhia region.