Russia just hit Ukraine with a huge drone and missile barrage and Vinnytsia has no power
1 hour ago · 17 October 2026Share
A Pegasus kamikaze drone displayed at an exhibition in Kazan, Russia. File photo. Vyacheslav Kirillin · CC BY-SA 4.0
Russia just hit Ukraine with a huge wave of drones and missiles in one night.
So what actually got through? Let's break it down.
Ukraine's Air Force says it shot down or suppressed four Kalibr cruise missiles and 289 drones.
Here's the part that matters. Dozens of those drones were jet-powered Shaheds, built to fly faster than the normal ones. Most got stopped. Some didn't.
So some of the fast ones made it through.
The attack started around 6pm and ran all night into the morning.
Russia fired from everywhere at once. Iskander-M and KN-23 ballistic missiles from Voronezh, Rostov and occupied Crimea. Kh-22 and Kh-32 cruise missiles, also from Crimea. Four Kalibr missiles fired from ships near Novorossiysk, on Russia's Black Sea coast.
And mixed in with all of that, decoy drones. Gerbera and Parodiya models, built to look like Shaheds on radar. Plus a newer one called the S-8000 Banderol.
So Ukraine's air defence isn't just shooting at drones. It's trying to work out which ones are even real.
Impacts hit over twenty places. Debris from the stuff that did get shot down landed in a few more.
Now the damage, place by place.
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Destroyed buildings and police collecting missile remains in Zaporizhzhia after a Russian mass attack with missiles and drones in December 2023. File photo. National Police of Ukraine · CC BY 4.0
Kharkiv got hit first, the evening before the main wave. A missile hit the city's Nemyshlianskyi district, injuring 15 civilians, including three children. Tower blocks and a warehouse got damaged. Four separate fires broke out.
Zaporizhzhia got hit early the next morning. And here's the thing, the injury count kept climbing as officials checked on people. It went from two hurt, to five, including one child.
In Kryvyi Rih, Russian weapons hit an industrial site.
In Kherson's Korabelnyi district, a strike killed a 64 year old ambulance driver and wounded 12 people. One outlet is reporting that so far, so it's not confirmed elsewhere yet.
Vinnytsia lost power completely. Serhiy Morgunov, the city's mayor, says critical infrastructure is now running on backup generators. Engineers are still working out how bad the damage is. Nobody knows yet when the power comes back.
Ukraine's Air Force hasn't put out a nationwide death and injury count for this attack. Russia's military hasn't said a word about what it was aiming for, or claimed any of it.
And as of the last update, drones were still in Ukrainian airspace. So the full picture isn't even in yet.
This isn't a one-off night either. Russia has kept hitting Ukraine with this same mix, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones, for weeks now, as the war goes into its eighth month. Real weapons and decoys, all thrown in together, built to make Ukraine's air defence waste time guessing. That's just what a Russian night raid looks like now.
So what don't we know? The full damage. A complete nationwide death and injury count. When Vinnytsia gets power back. And whether Russia can keep firing at this size, or whether this was just an unusually big night.
Here's what we do know for certain. At least one person dead. Dozens wounded. A city with no power. And a large share of the jet-powered drones getting past Ukraine's defences.
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