Russia just launched its largest drone attack on Ukraine and peace talks start tomorrow
3 days ago · 9 November 2026Share
U.S. Army air defenders with Charlie Battery, 5th Battalion, 7th Air Defense Artillery return to Baumholder after a year-long deployment during a ceremony. File photo. U.S. Army 10AAMDC by Pfc. Yesenia Cadavid · Public domain
Russia just launched 317 drones at Ukraine overnight.
That's the biggest single drone attack of the whole war.
Ukraine's Air Force says it shot down or suppressed 271 of them. 81 out of 105 were the jet-powered kind, the expensive ones built to punch through air defences.
Drones hit 31 locations. Debris from the ones that got shot down fell in 9 more places.
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President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis honored the memory of residents killed in Odesa after a Russian Shahed UAV struck a nine-story residential building on March 2.President Of Ukraine from Україна · CC0
In Kremenchuk, in Poltava region, drones hit a 16-storey apartment block and a hotel. Rescuers pulled 15 people out. 7 were hurt, including a 16-year-old boy, seriously injured. A separate drone hit a house nearby and started a fire. Nobody was hurt there.
Drones also hit Dnipropetrovsk and Cherkasy regions. The governor of Dnipropetrovsk, Oleksandr Hanzha, says 23 drones were shot down there, with damage to a business in Dnipro and to infrastructure in Kamianske. The governor of Cherkasy, Ihor Taburets, says infrastructure in the regional capital was damaged. No injuries there.
Russia's Defence Ministry says it was aiming at Ukraine's military industry, hitting a plant in Hlobyne and power substations in four regions.
That's everything we know.
Why this matters
This is the biggest drone attack Russia has thrown at Ukraine since the war started. And it lands the night before peace talks are meant to begin.
So why does 317 matter? Because of what's inside that number. A third of these drones were jet-powered Shaheds. Those cost more. They fly faster. And they're built to swamp air defences by sheer weight of numbers.
Ukraine stopped 271 of them. That's a strong hit rate.
But 46 still got through. And that's why the damage is spread across five regions in one night instead of hitting just one place hard.
The clearest image from tonight is Kremenchuk. A 16-storey apartment block. A hotel. Rescue workers pulling people out. A teenager among the injured.
Russia says it was going after military-industrial targets, not homes. Ukraine's account is a direct hit on an apartment building and a hotel. Those two versions sit right next to each other, unresolved.
And here's the thing. This attack cut both ways.
Ukrainian drones hit Russia's Kirishi oil refinery overnight, one of Russia's biggest, as part of a months-long campaign to choke off Moscow's fuel supply. A Russian drone that Ukraine shot down came down on an apartment roof in Vsevolozhsk, Leningrad region, and killed a woman there. Nobody has said yet whether the refinery itself took real damage beyond the fire. The company that runs it hasn't commented.
Russian state media also say Russian forces hit a cargo ship in the Black Sea they say was carrying weapons to Ukraine. That claim hasn't been confirmed by anyone else.
Now the timing. Russian, Ukrainian and American delegations are due in Abu Dhabi starting tomorrow for talks aimed at ending the war. Rustem Umerov is leading Ukraine's side. Big attacks right before talks aren't new in this war. Both sides have used them before to walk into the room with more leverage.
It also comes a day after Ukraine's General Staff said Russia lost a record number of soldiers killed or seriously hurt in a single day, on the 8th of November. Kyiv is already using that as proof Moscow is under serious pressure on the ground, even while it keeps launching huge air attacks.
Neither government has said whether this is a deliberate shift to bigger, more frequent strikes, or just one unusually large night. Both sides are sitting down at the same table within 48 hours.
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