Russia’s Jet Drones Come by Day; Moscow Counts 290

KYIV, Ukraine, Oct. 26 — RussiaRussia attacked Ukraine overnight with 140 Shahed-type strike drones, 70 of them jet-powered, along with Gerbera and decoy drones, Ukraine’s Air Force said on Monday, and the jets kept coming after its morning tally. In the four hours that followed its 8 a.m. count, the Air Force posted 13 more alerts of jet drones, among them drones crossing the Kyiv Reservoir toward the capital at 9:36 a.m.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said its air defenses destroyed 290 Ukrainian drones over 15 Russian regions and the Moscow region between 8 p.m. Sunday and 9 a.m. Monday, Moscow time. Neither count can be checked independently, and the two windows start an hour apart.Both CountsOver the seven nights ending Monday, the ministry’s overnight claims add up to 3,198 Ukrainian drones destroyed. The Air Force’s published figures add up to 1,156 Shahed-type drones launched at Ukraine, 618 of them jets, besides other drones and decoys. Both are this paper’s sums; Russia’s figure counts only drones it says it destroyed.

The drone war now runs both ways, by hundreds a night on each side’s count, and both sides are building for it. What they hit, Russia’s refineries and Ukraine’s power grid, is now the subject of a public offer from Kyiv.

By 8 a.m., the Air Force said, Ukraine had downed or suppressed 112 drones of several types, 56 of them jets, and all three Kh-59/69 guided missiles fired; weapons hit 15 locations. Ukrenergo, the grid operator, reported new power outages from Russian attacks in six regions on Monday morning. Russia’s ministry said its drones had struck, overnight, substations in Kharkiv and Kamianets-Podilskyi and port terminals at Chornomorsk, which it described as serving Ukraine’s military.

Ukraine’s drones flew farther. On Sunday the governor of Russia’s Perm region, Dmitry Makhonin, said 11 drones had been downed in a Ukrainian attack and that an “industrial facility” in the region’s north had “minor” damage but continued to operate as normal; five employees were injured, the Kyiv Independent reported. Exilenova+, a Ukrainian monitoring channel, said the target was the Avisma plant in Berezniki, which the Kyiv Independent puts more than 1,400 kilometers from the border.AvismaPart of the Russian metals group VSMPO-AVISMA, the plant is one of the world’s largest producers of titanium sponge; its products go into military aircraft, nuclear submarines, armored vehicles and missile systems, the Kyiv Independent reports. It has been under U.S. sanctions since 2023.

Later that day, the independent Russian outlet Astra reported, Ukrainian forces attacked the Energiya plant in Yelets, in the Lipetsk region, which makes drone batteries and power sources for air-defense missiles. Ukraine had not commented on either strike when the Kyiv Independent published.

The strikes reach Russia’s data centers, too. Its Digital Development Ministry has proposed building them underground, camouflaged from the air and fitted with drone defenses, Kommersant reported on Oct. 25, after Ukrainian drones hit three Yandex data centers, a Sberbank facility under construction and a VK data center from Oct. 8 to Oct. 18, the Kyiv Independent said.

President Volodymyr Zelensky, in a television interview carried by Ukrinform on Sunday, offered to stop striking Russia’s oil refineries if Russia stopped striking Ukraine’s power grid. “If you want us to stop striking Russia’s diesel and oil refining infrastructure, it’s very simple. Then they stop striking our power grid. And that’s fair. An energy ceasefire. That’s how it can work,” he told TSN.Tyzhden, in Ukrinform’s translation. He made a similar offer on Oct. 12, a day after President Trump said the two countries had agreed to an energy ceasefire; the Kremlin’s spokesman would not say whether Russia had agreed, the AP reported.

Mr. Zelensky also told the program that Starlink’s problems were resolved after an Oct. 20 meeting in Oslo, with the service working at 420 kilometers an hour as of 5:20 a.m. on Oct. 24, the day Elon Musk wrote that Ukraine had broken Starlink’s terms. “For now, anyway,” he said, warning that “there may be various challenges during the U.S. elections,” in Ukrinform’s translation.

The drones are becoming an export. Germany is negotiating to buy Bars, a Ukrainian jet-powered drone, an unnamed German official told the Kyiv Independent on Saturday. A representative of its unnamed maker told the Ukrainian outlet NV in September that Bars has a range of more than 1,000 kilometers and a top speed of 700 kilometers an hour. “More than 2,000 Bars units are made a month, in various modifications and configurations,” he said, in this paper’s translation; refineries, power plants and substations are among their missions.

Some Russian jet drones can fly at about 600 kilometers an hour, nearly twice the 320 that one Kyiv unit’s interceptor drones reach at full throttle, the Kyiv Independent reported. Ukraine’s government had ordered more than 1,000 new high-speed interceptors, Andrii Hrytseniuk, then head of the state-backed Brave1 program, said on Oct. 18.

The next tests are diplomatic. Mr. Zelensky has said Ukraine, the United States and Russia agreed to a meeting of negotiating teams in the first half of November, Ukrinform reported; the U.S. midterm elections are on Nov. 3.