Russia launched a record number of UAVs into Ukraine in April

French news agency AFP On May 1, it announced an assessment based on statistics from the Ukrainian Air Force Command, according to which Russia used a total of 6,583 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in raids in April.

The above number is 2% higher than the number of UAVs in March, which was the previous record. Ukraine has announced that it has destroyed a total of 88% of Russian missiles and UAVs.

Western experts say that Russia previously almost exclusively launched UAVs at night, but in recent weeks has increased the frequency of raids during the day and seems to be aiming to cause more damage to Ukraine.

“Russia applied a new tactic of combining a large attack at night and an raid of equal scale during the day, at the risk of causing civilian casualties,” the US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) assessed.

Pavlo Palisa, deputy chief of staff of President Volodymyr Zelensky, accused this of being an attempt by Russia to cause panic among Ukrainians as winter ends. “This is also an economic problem when large-scale raids during office hours significantly paralyze business activities,” Mr. Palisa said.

Russia has not commented on the above information. The Russian Ministry of Defense has repeatedly stated that its forces do not attack civilian infrastructure and civilians, only targeting military and energy facilities serving Ukraine’s defense activities.

The Russian military began using long-range UAVs to attack Ukraine from October 2022, including the Geran model said to be developed based on Iran’s Shahed-136. Ukraine claims to own the best anti-UAV system in the world after 4 years of dealing with Russian raids.

Ukrainian interceptor drones were recently used to take down Iranian UAVs in the Middle East. Firm Reuters On April 22, it was reported that the US military has deployed the Sky Map air defense command system, specializing in synthesizing data from radar and sensors to deal with UAVs, as well as control drone interception.