According to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Russia is preparing a protracted campaign of drone assaults against Ukraine to “exhaust” it.
Zelenskyy stated that Ukraine had received information that Russia would step up its campaign of drone assaults on the country in his nightly address to the nation on Monday.
“We have information that Russia is planning a long-term attack using Shahed drones,” Zelenskyy remarked.
“It is probably banking on exhaustion. Exhausting our people, our anti-aircraft defences, our energy,” he added.
Ukraine, he stated, had to “act and do everything so that the terrorists fail in their aim, as all their others have failed.”
According to the Russian defence ministry, 63 servicemen perished in the catastrophic explosion that levelled temporary quarters inside a former vocational college in Makiivka, the twin city of the Russian-occupied regional capital of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.
It claimed that two rockets had been shot down out of the four that were believed to have been launched from US-made HIMARS launchers and hit the lodging. Although pro-Russian officials dismissed this as an exaggeration, Kyiv claimed that the number of Russian fatalities was in the hundreds.
In just the first two days of 2023, Zelenskyy claimed that Ukrainian forces had shot dozens of drones, and he predicted that the number would soon rise.
“Only two days have passed since the beginning of the year … and already the number of drones shot down over Ukraine is over 80,” he claimed.
The Russian military is increasingly utilising so-called kamikaze drones, which are armed with explosives that descend vertically and quickly on their target after their flight route, causing significant damage and casualties.
The Russian drone war plan has been to launch a large number of unmanned projectiles at a specific target and overload Ukraine’s air surveillance and defence systems, despite the Iranian Shahed drones’ relatively slow movement and ease of target for the country’s air defences.
