Dueling Aerial Assaults Hit Ukraine and Russia

KYIV, Ukraine — A wave of exploding drones was launched in six regions of Russia overnight Wednesday, Russian officials said, damaging four military cargo planes at an airfield 30 miles from the border with Estonia, a NATO member, in an apparent sign that Ukraine was increasingly capable of striking back deep inside Moscow’s territory.

Around the same time, Russia unleashed an aerial assault on at least three regions of Ukraine, officials in Ukraine said, including one of the most significant barrages the Kyiv region has experienced in months. Ukraine’s air force said it had shot down 43 of 44 incoming missiles and drones.

Explosions and the roar of air-defense missiles shook Kyiv, the capital, around 5 a.m. Serhiy Popko, head of the Kyiv regional military administration, said that two people in the city had been killed by falling debris.

The assault in Russia came after months of Moscow’s deadly missile and drone strikes on Ukrainian cities, infrastructure and military targets. While Ukrainian officials did not claim responsibility for the overnight strikes on Russian soil, in keeping with standard practice, they have made it increasingly clear that they view taking the war to ordinary Russians as a legitimate tactic against Moscow’s invasion.

“We all went through these attacks by Russia,” Oleksandr Danylyuk, the former secretary of Ukraine’s national security and defense council, said in an interview Wednesday. “We understand how destructive they can be. It’s important to be able to retaliate.”

The attacks in Russia have destroyed valuable military equipment, but have done little significant damage to Moscow’s overall military might. They are also intended to pierce Moscow’s propaganda by showing Russians that their military is vulnerable, experts say.

In what appeared to be the most successful strike Wednesday, four Russian Il-76 military cargo planes were hit while parked near a runway in Pskov. The Russian regional governor, Mikhail Vedernikov, posted video footage on the Telegram messaging app of a large nighttime fire with smoke billowing from an airfield, and what appeared to be air defenses being fired at drones.

Vedernikov said drones had damaged the planes, although the extent was unclear. He later wrote that after a review of the airfield, “everything is in order” and that operations would resume there Thursday.

U.S. officials have said the drone attacks are intended to demonstrate to the Ukrainian public that Kyiv can still strike back, even as its counteroffensive to reclaim Russian-occupied territory in the south and east of the country moves at a grinding pace.

Kyiv’s long-range strikes also appear to be helping the morale of soldiers at the front. Serhiy, a marine fighting in southern Ukraine who asked to be identified only by his first name for security reasons, said that Ukraine was expanding the reach of its domestic weapons.

“The farther we can reach,” he said, “the quicker the Russians realize that we can do real harm.”

Ukraine has half a dozen or so models of long-range drones under development, including some that can fly more than 1,000 kilometers, or 620 miles, Ukrainian designers say. The Pskov region is more than 600 kilometers, or 400 miles, from the Ukrainian border.

“They launched a boomerang, and it will fly back to them,” Danylyuk said of the long-range missile and drone strikes. “Russians — not just in the Kremlin, not just on the border with Ukraine — all Russians need to understand that a war is taking place.”

A flurry of experimentation by Ukrainian drone manufacturers is now coming to fruition, Danylyuk added. He did not, however, claim Ukrainian responsibility for the overnight attack.

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