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UK Defense Ministry: Increased drone attacks likely an attempt to exhaust Ukraine's air defense

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Russia has likely increased its drone attacks against Ukraine in an attempt to exhaust Ukraine's air defense missile stocks, the U.K. Defense Ministry reported on June 5.

In May, Russia launched over 300 Iranian-made Shahed drones at Ukraine, with a significant number of them targeting the capital.

It was the "most intense use of this weapon system to date" but Ukraine was able to intercept "at least" 90 percent of them using "older and cheaper air defense weapons" along with electronic jamming, the U.K. Defense Ministry wrote.

According to the U.K. Defense Ministry, Russia has also likely been attempting to target Ukrainian troop positions beyond the front line but remains "very ineffective at hitting such dynamic targets at range because of its poor targeting processes."

Russia used Shahed drones along with missiles last fall and winter to target Ukraine's energy infrastructure, resulting in considerable infrastructure damage and civilian deaths.

How repurposed Russian air defense missiles expose holes in Ukraine’s sky
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Kate Tsurkan

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Kate Tsurkan is a reporter at the Kyiv Independent who writes mostly about culture-related topics in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Her newsletter Explaining Ukraine with Kate Tsurkan, which focuses specifically on Ukrainian culture, is published weekly by the Kyiv Independent. The U.S. publisher Deep Vellum published her co-translation of Ukrainian author Oleh Sentsov’s Diary of a Hunger Striker in 2024. Some of her other writing and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Harpers, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is the co-founder of Apofenie Magazine.

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