Overnight Drone War: Russia Fires 101 Shaheds as Both Sides Hit Each Other’s Energy Grids
Russia unleashed 101 Shahed-type drones and decoys against Ukraine overnight, while Ukraine hit Russian and occupied energy infrastructure from Poltava to Crimea and Orenburg. Civilians on both sides spent the night between air-raid alerts and blackouts as power plants, substations, and gas facilities became primary targets in an intensifying energy war.
The war between Russia and Ukraine moved further into the power plants and substations that keep both countries running overnight, as Russia launched more than a hundred attack drones at Ukrainian targets and Ukraine answered with strikes that set energy facilities ablaze from central Ukraine to occupied Crimea and deep inside Russia.
Ukraine’s military reported that Russia fired 101 Shahed-type attack drones and decoys during the night of 23–24 June, describing a complex wave designed to saturate air defenses. Ukrainian air-defense forces said they shot down or suppressed 95 of the drones, but confirmed that six struck targets across five locations and warned that the attack remained ongoing as of early morning. The sheer volume of UAVs underscores Moscow’s continued reliance on relatively cheap, expendable systems to wear down Ukraine’s defenses and hunt for gaps.
Those gaps showed up in Ukraine’s own energy map. Thermal anomaly data and local reports indicate that fires broke out at the “Zapadnaya Solokha” gas treatment plant near the village of Arsenivka in Poltava Oblast after Russian Geran‑2 drones – the name Russia uses for its Shahed‑type systems – hit the facility overnight. In Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, at least two Russian KAB glide bombs impacted near the town of Manvelivka, 50 kilometers from the frontline, while in Zaporizhzhia City, Russian forces used a mix of KABs and Geran‑2 drones to strike the Pivdennyi district.
For Ukrainian civilians in these regions, the immediate reality is familiar: hours in shelters listening to the buzz of drones and distant explosions, followed by disrupted gas processing and power supply. For workers at plants like Zapadnaya Solokha, every alert now carries the risk that critical energy infrastructure could be turned into a fire zone. Even when casualty figures are not immediately reported, the economic and psychological toll of living next to high-risk industrial targets grows with each wave.
Kyiv did not merely absorb hits. Ukrainian forces used their own drones to strike energy and military-related targets under Russian control. In addition to the deep strike on the Orenburg gas processing plant and the attack on the Simferopol thermal power station that contributed to blackouts in occupied Crimea, Ukrainian forces reported destroying three Russian naval drones overnight, limiting Moscow’s ability to harass shipping and coastal infrastructure with unmanned surface systems.
This duel over infrastructure is no side-show. Russia’s strategy increasingly pairs frontline attrition with sustained pressure on Ukraine’s electricity and gas systems, seeking to make daily life in Ukrainian cities more fragile and industrial recovery harder. Ukraine, constrained in conventional long-range strike weapons, has leaned heavily on improvised and domestically produced drones to extend the war into Russia’s rear and to turn occupation logistics into a permanent headache.
The result is a widening energy battlefield where refineries, gas plants, thermal power stations, and substations are targeted not only for their immediate output but for the uncertainty they inject into national planning. Power grids are designed for redundancy, but they are not designed for sustained, deliberate attack from the air.
A key takeaway is that power, in this war, means more than territory or tanks; it also means the literal ability of states to keep the lights on and factories running under fire. The more each side leans on drones to hit energy nodes, the more civilians – far from the trenches – find themselves back inside the blast radius of strategy.
In the coming days, watch for updated damage assessments to the Poltava gas facility and other Ukrainian energy sites, any shifts in Ukraine’s rolling blackout schedules, and confirmation of how long blackouts persist in Crimea and Russian-held Kherson. Another indicator will be whether both sides escalate further toward higher-value, harder-to-repair grid targets, or whether diplomatic backchannels attempt to draw at least informal lines around the most sensitive infrastructure.
Sources
- OSINT