Russia pounded Ukraine overnight with hundreds of drones and missiles, Ukrainian authorities said Sunday, in one of the war’s largest assaults. Strikes on infrastructure were reported across the country, including in western Ukraine, which Russia hits less frequently.

The attack was the latest in a series of escalating Russian air assaults, with Moscow repeatedly setting new marks for the number of weapons used. The Ukrainian air force said Russia had launched 537 drones and missiles overnight — “the most massive airstrike” on the country since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, taking into account both drones and various types of missiles, Yuriy Ihnat, head of communications for Ukraine’s air force, told the Associated Press.

Decoy drones used

The figure includes nonlethal decoy drones designed to confuse Ukrainian air defenses, which Russia has begun using on a mass scale only in the past year, making comparisons with attacks earlier in the war difficult.Still, the decoys have significant effects. Ukraine’s military is forced to use its limited stockpiles of air defense missiles to counter Russia’s large-scale assaults, which military experts and Ukrainian officials say are aimed at overwhelming Ukraine’s air defense units on the ground. The air defense missiles are the only weapons capable of shooting down incoming missiles.

Ukraine’s air force said about 90% of the Russian drones were intercepted, were disabled by electronic jamming, or crashed without causing damage because they were decoys. But it added that only two-thirds of the missiles that Russia fired were shot down, including just one of seven ballistic missiles. These figures could not be independently verified.

The Ukrainian air force reported the death of a pilot who crashed in his American-designed F-16 jet as he was trying to repel the Russian assault. Ukraine uses fighter jets to shoot down incoming missiles, for lack of enough ground-based air defenses.

The air force said the pilot had shot down seven aerial targets but went down with his jet after it was damaged in the attack.

Three people were killed in each of the drone strikes in the Kherson, Kharkiv and the Dnipropetrovsk regions, according to the three governors.

Another person was killed by an airstrike in Kostyantynivka, local officials said. In addition to aerial attacks, a man died when Russian troops shelled the city of Kherson, and the body of a 70-year-old woman was found under the rubble of a nine-story building hit by Russian shelling in the Zaporizhzhia region.

During nighttime attacks, Russia typically begins its assaults by sending waves of dozens of drones to strain Ukrainian air defenses, followed by missiles that are harder to intercept.

Ramped up air attacks

A report released in May by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an American think tank, said Russia had significantly ramped up its use of drones starting last fall, “increasing from approximately 200 launched per week to more than 1,000 per week by March 2025 as part of a sustained pressure campaign.”

Given the current pace of attacks, Russia may exceed 5,000 drone launches this month, which would set a record for the conflict, said Konrad Muzyka, a military analyst at Rochan Consulting in Poland. To support these attacks, Russia has dramatically increased its production of long-range drones.

“Moscow will not stop as long as it has the capability to launch massive strikes,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on social media Sunday, as he called again for Ukraine’s allies to increase sanctions on the Russian economy to cripple its weapons production capacities.

Russia’s new campaign of air assaults on Ukraine has also come with deadly consequences for civilians.

The United Nations human rights office reported Sunday that civilian casualties in Ukraine had increased 37% in the period from December to May, compared with the same period the previous year, with 968 civilians killed and 4,807 injured. The majority of these casualties occurred in Ukrainian-controlled areas.

Russians advance

Russia’s Defense Ministry said it had shot down three Ukrainian drones overnight.

Two people were wounded in another Ukrainian drone attack on the city of Bryansk in western Russia, regional Gov. Alexander Bogomaz said Sunday morning, adding that seven more Ukrainian drones had been shot down over the region.

Meanwhile, Russia claimed Sunday that it had taken control of the village of Novoukrainka in the partially Russian-occupied Donetsk region.

Russian forces have been slowly grinding forward at some points on the roughly 620-mile front line, though their incremental gains have been costly in terms of troop casualties and damaged armor.

Ukraine out of pact

Zelenskyy signed a decree to withdraw Ukraine from the Ottawa Convention banning antipersonnel land mines, a Ukrainian lawmaker said Sunday. The move follows similar recent steps by the Baltic States and Poland.

The 1997 treaty prohibits the use, production, stockpiling and transfer of antipersonnel land mines in an effort to protect civilians from explosives that can maim or kill long after fighting ends.

This story includes reporting from the Associated Press.