KYIV, Ukraine >> As Russian troops march relentlessly forward with fierce assaults in Ukraine’s east, Moscow is unleashing a different form of terror on civilians in towns and cities: a wave of long-range drone strikes that has little precedent in the 32-month-old war.

Over the past two months, there was only one night when Russia did not launch swarms of drones packed with explosives at targets far from the front, including near-nightly attacks aimed at Kyiv, the capital.

In October, the Ukrainian military said it tracked a record 2,023 unmanned aircraft against civilian and military targets, with the vast majority shot down or disabled by electronic warfare systems.

Night after night, the explosions echo across Kyiv, with tracer fire lighting up the sky as spotlights search for the triangle-shape drones flying over residential neighborhoods.

Shots rang out once again before dawn Thursday as air defense teams armed with heavy machine guns opened fire on drones flying over the heart of the capital. Debris rained down over businesses and apartment buildings, sparking several fires.

Though air defense teams have limited the casualties in Kyiv — one 14-year-old girl was killed in October and more than 20 people injured, officials said — the Russians continue to unleash punishing bombardments with drones, bombs and missiles on other towns and cities across the country.

“The constant terrorist attacks on Ukrainian cities prove that the pressure on Russia and its accomplices is insufficient,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine said Sunday, reiterating his pleas to the Biden administration to loosen restrictions on the use of Western weapons to hit targets deep inside Russia.

“Ukraine deserves the same strong security as all our partners in the free world,” he said.

As Ukraine continues to plead with its allies to provide more sophisticated air defense systems, scores of air defense teams using heavy guns and other weapons form a chain stretching to the Russian border to combat drones as they fly in from Russia.

“It’s like bees swarming from a hive in spring to gather honey,” Senior Pvt. Yurii, 37, the leader of mobile air defense team with the 27th Brigade of National Guard, said at the end of a 16-hour shift. Russia had directed 96 drones at targets across the country during that time.

“If we make visual or acoustic contact, we open fire,” he said, providing only his first name according to military protocol. “We use as much ammunition as we have. If we can’t handle it alone, we call for backup and another unit joins us.”

In recent weeks, he and other soldiers said, the Russians have been flying drones low to evade radar detection, frequently changing course to confuse air defense teams, using decoy drones with no warheads to overwhelm defenses and sending surveillance drones along with strike drones to gather intelligence.

Continuous strategy

The stepped-up drone assaults are part of a deadly and unrelenting campaign that has been playing out as the Russians continue to try to batter Ukrainians into submission. The Kremlin is using not just drones, but nearly every conventional weapon in its arsenal to hit both military and civilian targets.

In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, 14 people were injured Sunday after a 1,000-pound Russian bomb slammed into a supermarket, according to Ukrainian officials. Roughly 380 buildings in Kharkiv were damaged in Russian attacks in October, Mayor Ihor Terekhov said.

The port city of Odesa came under missile attack 14 out of 31 days in October, including from ballistic missile strikes aimed at port infrastructure, Ukrainian officials said. More than a dozen people were killed in the strikes.

At least six people were killed and 16 more injured Tuesday morning in a missile strike in Zaporizhzhia, in southern Ukraine, according to local officials.

And in Kherson, Russian soldiers are hunting Ukrainian civilians with small piloted drones laden with explosives, according to local officials. Many strikes were captured in video footage and broadcast on Russian social media channels.

Two years after the Russians were driven out of Kherson, located on the western bank of the Dnieper River, 25 people were killed and 146 others wounded in Russian attacks in October, four times as many as in the previous month, Roman Mrochko, the head of the Kherson military administration, wrote in a statement.

As the civilian toll grows, the Russian military is intensifying its offensive against Kyiv’s troops in eastern Ukraine.

Ukraine’s top military commander, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, warned Saturday that his forces were confronting “one of the most powerful Russian offensives” since the Kremlin ordered its full-scale invasion.