Russian Drone Factories Fuel Record Strikes --- Recent attack saw the largest number of devices fired in a night in Ukraine conflict

 

“KYIV, Ukraine -- Russia's factories have begun churning out vast quantities of attack drones during the past year, producing a deadly fleet that is taking to Ukrainian skies in record numbers nearly daily.

 

An assault Wednesday was the largest yet, according to Ukrainian officials, as Russia launched 728 drones and decoy munitions at cities in the western part of the country. The attacks came hours after President Trump blasted Moscow for dragging its feet over peace talks, saying the U.S. gets "a lot of bulls----" from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the attack showed again that Putin doesn't want to end the conflict. "At a time like this, when so much has been done to achieve peace, and a cease-fire, and only Russia is rebuffing them all," he said on social media.

 

The attacks often are targeted at Ukrainian military sites and at getting Ukraine to use up its interceptor drones.

 

Kyiv said its air defenses downed most of the drones in Wednesday's attack, and the damage, which included several warehouses in western Ukraine, was limited.

 

But the attacks also have killed many and contributed to a sense of siege in Ukraine's cities and towns. Air-raid sirens are sending people to bomb shelters in parts of Ukraine almost nightly.

 

More than 24,000 drones have barreled toward Ukraine's towns and cities since the start of this year alone, according to an analysis of Ukrainian figures by the Center for Information Resilience, a U.K.-based open-source investigations organization. Wednesday's attack included more drones in a single night than in the entire month of July 2024.

 

"They're constantly beating new records," said Yuriy Ihnat, a spokesman for Ukraine's air force.

 

Russia recently hit an earlier record after a call between Trump and Putin, which led the U.S. president to say he was disappointed in the Russian leader for being unwilling to stop the conflict.

 

Moscow on Wednesday tried to play down Trump's latest comments, which were made during a Tuesday cabinet meeting where he said that a lot of what Putin has ben saying is "meaningless."

 

"We are fairly calm about this," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said of Trump's criticism of Putin.

 

What paved the way for the unprecedented scale of Wednesday's drone attacks was an agreement Russia signed in November 2022 with Tehran to buy and produce Iran's Shahed attack drones on Russian territory. Moscow paid $1.75 billion for the Shahed technology, equipment, source code and 6,000 drones, according to a report from C4ADS, a nonprofit organization researching networks worldwide.

 

At the time, Moscow had expended much of its long-range rocket stocks that year, and the effective but cheap Iranian drones offered a solution, allowing Moscow to continue its aerial assaults. Estimates on how much it costs Russia to produce the drones vary widely, with defense analysts putting it anywhere from $35,000 to $60,000.

 

The initial models were shipped directly from Iran, but Russia paid for the technology and, over time, mastered the elements of the production chain. In Tatarstan, east of Moscow, facilities inside the Alabuga Special Economic Zone expanded to accommodate the requirements of drone manufacture.

 

Alabuga drew on Chinese components, a workforce that included cheap laborers hired from Africa, and the logistics networks that Iran had honed during its own yearslong standoff with the West.

 

Ukrainian drones have struck the facility several times, but Russia has continued the work.

 

Intelligence officials in Kyiv say it has since outsourced parts of it to other facilities across the country.

 

For Russia, making the drones locally has been a way of reducing its reliance on Iran -- a prescient decision in light of Israel's bombardment of Iran last month and the depletion of Tehran's own drone stocks through retaliatory attacks on Israel.

 

Moscow's adaptations also have improved on Iran's original design, making them faster and quieter. That has increased their maneuverability and helped maximize damage.

 

Ukrainian officials say Russia is producing more than 5,000 of the long-range drones and decoys each month, with some able to fly 2,500 kilometers to their target. That has allowed Moscow to saturate Ukraine's skies with the machines.

 

Ukraine meets the threat by scrambling jet fighters and helicopters, deploying electronic jamming and mobile air-defense teams on the ground, and increasingly, drones tasked with intercepting the Russian munitions hurtling through the sky.

 

"We're using all the resources at our disposal," said Ihnat, the air force spokesman.

 

Separately, on Tuesday night, authorities in Russia's Kursk said three civilians were killed and seven injured in a drone strike on a beach in the city. A video published by Russian law enforcement showed an official sifting through what he said was the wreckage of a destroyed drone.

 

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Decoys Aim to Draw Defenses

 

Russia is regularly changing its tactics to wreak maximum efficiency. Moscow's goal is to force Ukraine to expend valuable interceptor missiles in bringing down decoy drones, which resemble ordinary Shahed drones but carry no payload. Russia deploys hundreds of these imitator drones to distract Ukraine's air defenses from the real threat, Kyiv says.

 

Ukraine is getting better at identifying these decoys, noting differences in their sound, appearance and flight path, said a military spokesman. Ukraine aims to disable them using only electronic warfare.” [1]

 

1. World News: Russian Drone Factories Fuel Record Strikes --- Recent attack saw the largest number of devices fired in a night in Ukraine conflict. Luxmoore, Matthew; Lytvynenko, Jane.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 10 July 2025: A7.