Russia Aims Jet Drones and Missiles at Kyiv’s Power

KYIV, Ukraine, Nov. 7 — RussiaRussia attacked Ukraine overnight into Saturday with Iskander-M, Zircon, KN-23 and S-400 missiles and 172 drones, 137 of them jet-powered, by the count of Ukraine’s Air Force. It named the Kyiv region as the main target, and reported hits at 24 locations.The CountThe Air Force counts each night from 6 p.m. Its drone total puts Shahed-type drones, the jets among them, in one tally with Gerbera drones and Parody decoys. By 9 a.m. it reported four missiles and 149 drones shot down or suppressed, with several drones still in the air.

President Volodymyr Zelensky put the missiles at 36, all ballistic and all aimed at Kyiv and the region around it, and said later in the day that only four were stopped. “The main target of the strike was, again, energy,” he wrote on Telegram, in Ukrainian; translations here are this paper’s.

Jets and ballistic missiles each strain Ukraine’s defenses, by its own officials’ accounts. Against conventional Shaheds, effectiveness “already exceeds 90%,” the defense minister, Yevhenii Khmara, told journalists last month, in Ukrinform’s English account. “The challenge now is jet-powered drones, which require different interception speeds,” he said. Mr. Khmara also said Ukraine had successfully intercepted jet drones and was expanding the systems that worked. Of the missiles, Mr. Zelensky wrote on Saturday afternoon that “a significant shortage of interceptors for the Patriots persists,” and that the United States, above all, could help overcome it.

The jet share rose sharply. In the Air Force’s five morning reports from Monday to Friday, jets were 26 to 51 percent of the drones; on Saturday they were 80 percent, and their number, 137, was the most of the six. By 9 a.m. it reported 117 of them downed or suppressed, or 85 percent, against 32 of the other 35 drones.

In Kyiv, Mr. Zelensky said, the supply of electricity, water and heat was in a difficult state; homes and the North Bridge were damaged, and a kindergarten partly destroyed. In the region around the capital, he said, Russia struck “substations that connect the Rivne and Khmelnytskyi nuclear plants with Kyiv and the central regions of Ukraine.” Substations were also damaged in the Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Rivne, Kharkiv and Dnipro regions, and nine people were hurt, one of them a child, he said.The OutagesOn Friday evening, Ukrenergo, the national energy company, announced hourly power cuts for all kinds of customers in parts of the country on Saturday, which it put down to the effects of massive Russian attacks on energy sites.

We need interceptor missiles for our Patriots.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said it had hit the North Bridge, which it called a route for weapons to Ukraine’s forces, and, in the Kyiv region, the Trypilska thermal power plant, which it put at 1,800 megawatts, and the 750-kilovolt Kyivska substation. Those are Russia’s claims; Mr. Zelensky did not name the energy sites that were hit. The ministry also said its air defenses had destroyed 411 Ukrainian drones overnight over 10 Russian regions, Crimea and the Azov and Black seas.

Mr. Zelensky turned the night into an appeal to Washington, four days after the midterm elections. “We are counting on increased attention to Ukraine from the U.S. Congress,” he wrote. On Friday night he had warned, in English, that another strike was being prepared against the energy sector, the bridges across the Dnipro and civilian infrastructure.

“We need interceptor missiles for our Patriots,” he wrote then. On Saturday he added that, by preliminary findings, Russia had used KN-23 missiles, which North Korea makes and supplies, against one of the key energy sites it damaged.