Russia Pounds Ukraine With Drones and Missiles in One of War’s Largest Attacks

Russia pounded Ukraine overnight with hundreds of drones and missiles, the Ukrainian authorities said on Sunday, in one of the war’s largest assaults. Strikes on infrastructure were reported across the country, including in western Ukraine, which Russia hits less frequently.

The attack was the latest in a series of escalating Russian air assaults, with Moscow repeatedly setting new marks for the number of weapons used. The Ukrainian Air Force said Russia had launched 537 drones and missiles overnight — the highest number recorded in a single night so far.

The figure includes nonlethal decoy drones designed to confuse Ukrainian air defenses, which Russia has begun using on a mass scale only in the past year, making comparisons with attacks earlier in the war difficult.

Still, the decoys have significant effects. Ukraine’s military is forced to use its limited stockpiles of air defense missiles to counter Russia’s large-scale assaults, which military experts and Ukrainian officials say are aimed at overwhelming Ukraine’s air defense units on the ground. The air defense missiles are the only weapons capable of shooting down incoming missiles.

Ukraine’s air force said about 90 percent of the Russian drones were intercepted, were disabled by electronic jamming, or crashed without causing damage because they were decoys. But it added that only two-thirds of the missiles that Russia fired were shot down, including just one of seven ballistic missiles. These figures could not be independently verified.

It was unclear whether any civilians were killed during the overnight attack. But the Ukrainian Air Force reported the death of a pilot who crashed in his American-designed F-16 jet as he was trying to repel the Russian assault. Ukraine uses fighter jets to shoot down incoming missiles, for lack of enough ground-based air defenses.