Ukraine fired almost 1,200 drones at targets across Russia overnight, in one of the largest aerial attacks since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion nearly five years ago.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said its air defences shot down 1,198 long-range Ukrainian drones between late on Thursday and early on Friday, with 467 of them headed for the Moscow region. Flights were grounded at all four of the capital’s airports as the drones came in waves through the night.
The strikes that got through killed seven people, including a 12-year-old child, and wounded 17 across three Russian regions, local officials said. Four people were killed and two injured in the Volgograd region, where Ukraine’s General Staff said its drones hit an oil refinery and started a fire.
The Lukoil-owned Volgograd refinery is one of Russia’s ten largest, with a capacity of about 110 million barrels a year, according to Ukraine’s military, accounting for roughly 5.6 per cent of the country’s total refining capacity. Crude processing at the plant was suspended after the strike. Reuters reported that there was no official confirmation the refinery itself had been attacked, and Lukoil did not reply to a request for comment.
Ukraine has repeatedly targeted Russian refineries in recent months, and Kyiv claimed last month that its campaign had neutralised more than half of Russia’s refining capacity. The barrage appeared designed to show that Kyiv is holding its own in the war, countering Moscow’s insistence that a Russian victory is inevitable.
Russia answered with its own strikes. It launched 117 drones against Ukraine overnight, killing at least two people, including a 17-year-old, and a single attack on Friday on the southern city of Zaporizhzhia hit two five-storey apartment blocks and wounded 30 people, including six children. Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure caused power outages across about half of the country’s regions, according to First Deputy Energy Minister Artem Nekrasov. Moscow has battered Ukraine’s power grid each winter of the war, hoping to weaken public morale.
The escalation came as US-led efforts to negotiate an end to the war entered a delicate new phase. After two days of talks with Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Abu Dhabi this week, US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner briefed President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin and President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who was in Dublin to meet European leaders.
The talks have now widened to include broader European security arrangements that have been in place since the end of the Cold War, a change long sought by Moscow that has alarmed European leaders. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Russia wanted to talk about the European security architecture, adding: “We don’t need to talk about that. There is one,” referring to NATO. The EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, said Europe must insist on a ceasefire before taking the negotiations further. The Institute for the Study of War said in an assessment that Moscow was aiming “to dismantle NATO and the post-Cold War European security architecture”.
Zelenskiy on Friday also repeated his complaints about speed limits on the US Starshield system, SpaceX’s military-grade version of Starlink, which he said were limiting Ukrainian drones to 161 kph across the entire front line and making it impossible to deploy interceptors effectively against Moscow’s fast-moving jet-powered drones.
Note: The figure of 1,198 drones shot down is Russia’s Defence Ministry’s own account and has not been independently verified; Kyiv has not confirmed how many drones it launched. The refinery strike is claimed by Ukraine’s General Staff and has not been officially confirmed by Russia or Lukoil.
Sources: Associated Press — https://www.tricityrecordnm.com/articles/associated-press-new-mexico/ukraine-fires-nearly-1200-drones-at-russia-as-us-led-talks-consider-wider-european-security/ and https://www.santaanaherald.com/stories/ukraine-launches-nearly-1200-drones-at-russia-as-us-led-talks-to-consider-wider-european-security,2249557 ; Reuters (Volgograd toll and refinery reporting, via Reuters, 13 November 2026).
