Russia, Ukraine Trade Massive Overnight Strikes as Drones Turn Power Grids and Cities Into Targets
Russia launched one of its heaviest recent drone barrages against Ukraine overnight, sending at least 135 attack UAVs toward cities from Mykolaiv to Kyiv and Zaporizhzhia, while Ukrainian air defences claimed to down most of them. On the ground, fires burned at truck depots and in residential areas as Geran drones and Iskander missiles drove home how vulnerable power and logistics infrastructure remain. This piece explains the scale of the exchange, who is bearing the cost, and what it says about the next phase of the war.
Ukraine’s night sky again turned into a battlefield on 23 June, as Russia and Ukraine traded large-scale attacks that left fires burning in multiple cities and kept air defence crews and civilians awake into the morning. The volume and variety of drones and missiles involved underline how deeply both sides now rely on long-range strikes that put power grids, depots and urban areas in the blast radius of their strategies.
Ukrainian officials said Russia launched 135 attack drones overnight, a mix that included Iranian-designed Shahed systems, Russian Gerbera and Italmas models, and Parodiya decoys intended to confuse air defences. According to Kyiv’s account, 118 of the drones were shot down or electronically suppressed, but 13 strikes were recorded at 11 locations across the country. That ratio is militarily impressive and strategically sobering at the same time: even a high interception rate still leaves enough through to cause damage and fear.
Local and regional authorities reported drone attacks in Mykolaiv, Zaporizhzhia and areas around Kyiv. In Mykolaiv Oblast, overnight Geran-2 strikes hit targets in Mykolaiv City and the nearby town of Bashtanka, triggering fires. In Zaporizhzhia City, Geran-2 drones struck through the night and into the morning, setting multiple large blazes. One confirmed target was a truck depot in the western part of the city, where open-source imagery showed burning vehicles at coordinates 47.82757, 35.01144. Kyiv Oblast was targeted by three Geran-3 jet-powered drones, with explosions reported south of the capital.
Shortly after dawn, new warnings rippled across central Ukraine as ballistic missiles entered the picture. Monitors reported launches of Iskander-M missiles from Crimea directed at Dnipro and Kryvyi Rih, with explosions later confirmed in both cities. Additional alerts flagged an Iskander trajectory toward Kharkiv Oblast. As of the latest reports from Ukrainian channels, there was no official tally of casualties or the full extent of damage in these cities, but residents again spent part of the morning in shelters or corridors, listening for distant impacts.
For Ukrainians far from the front line, this pattern has become familiar: sirens, the thud of air defences firing, and the uncertainty that follows each explosion. When targets include truck depots and urban infrastructure, the effects cascade into daily life. Burned-out logistics hubs mean fewer deliveries of food, construction materials and humanitarian supplies; damaged substations and transformers mean flickering power or outages, forcing hospitals and utilities onto backup generation.
Russia is also pushing new tools into this campaign. One report from Kharkiv Oblast described a Russian fibre-optic first-person-view (FPV) drone striking a transformer at a 110 kV substation in the town of Staryi Saltiv, igniting a fire. FPV drones guided by operators via hardened links are harder to jam than conventional radio-controlled quadcopters, making them a growing threat to point targets like transformers, bridge spans and radar dishes that keep Ukraine’s war effort and civilian economy running.
Strategically, these overnight strikes reflect a contest over endurance as much as territory. Russia appears intent on exhausting Ukrainian air defences with mixed volleys of drones and missiles that force expensive interceptors to be used against cheap targets, while still slipping through enough warheads to keep pressure on cities and industry. Ukraine responds with increasingly sophisticated air defence networks and its own long-range hits on Russian military and industrial nodes, arguing that the best defence is to degrade the launch platforms and supply chains that make such barrages possible.
The human cost of this long-range duel is spread widely. Frontline troops rely on the same grids and transport routes being targeted; families hundreds of kilometres away live with the threat that their home, warehouse or hospital could be the next dot on a strike map.
The most telling signals to watch now are whether Russia sustains or further escalates the pace of multi-type drone launches, how often power and fuel infrastructure is directly hit, and whether Ukraine can continue to improve interception rates without depleting its stock of air defence missiles. Any significant shift in Western resupply of air defence systems—or a visible degradation in Ukraine’s ability to keep drones from reaching major cities—would mark a new phase in this war of attrition from the sky.
Sources
- OSINT