Russia has recently sought to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defences by launching major attacks that include increasing numbers of decoy drones.
The most recent one appeared aimed at disrupting Ukraine’s vital supply of Western weapons.
“Russia continues to expand its domestic drone production capacity amid the ever-growing role of tactical drones in front-line combat operations and Russia’s increasingly large nightly long-range strike packages against Ukraine,” the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said late Tuesday.
Ukraine has also built up its own offensive drone threat, reaching deep into Russia with some long-range strikes.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said Wednesday that air defences downed 86 Ukrainian drones over six Russian regions overnight, including the Moscow region.
Flights were temporarily suspended at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport and the international airport of Kaluga, south of Moscow.
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The governor of Russia’s Kursk border region, Alexander Khinshtein, said a Ukrainian drone attack on the region’s capital city just before midnight killed three people and wounded seven others, including the five-year-old boy who died on the way to a hospital.
Meanwhile, Europe’s top human rights court ruled Wednesday that Russia had violated international law during the war in Ukraine, the first time an international court has found Moscow responsible for human rights abuses since the full-scale invasion in 2022.
The court also ruled Russia was behind the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, the first time Moscow was named by an international court as being responsible for the 2014 tragedy that claimed 298 lives.
Any decision is largely symbolic.
