Under heavy cloud cover, Russia fires massive drone barrage at western Ukraine

Under heavy cloud cover, Russia fired a massive barrage of Geran-2 attack drones, the Russian-built version of Iran’s Shahed-136, at western Ukraine early Sunday. The Ukrainian General Staff said Russia launched 863 drones at Ukraine over the previous 24 hours, one of the largest barrages of the war.

French open-source analyst Clément Molin wrote on X that Russian forces flew the drones in large groups along the Belarusian border before turning west, with some reaching the Polish frontier by morning. Molin said the poor-visibility conditions that day made it harder for Ukrainian air-defense crews to track and engage the drones visually, and he said Russia had been holding back a stockpile of Geran-2s for weeks before launching them in this attack.

The Kyiv-based open-source monitoring group CyberBoroshno separately said the drone routes it tracked ran almost entirely under the cloud cover blanketing northern and western Ukraine that day, entering through the Chernihiv region and cutting west toward Volyn while a second group flew around Kyiv from the south. The group said overcast conditions degrade optical and thermal tracking and make visual spotting by mobile air-defense teams difficult, forcing crews to rely on sound alone.

Ukraine’s Air Force said the overnight wave mixed Shahed/Geran-2 drones with Gerbera decoys, Parodiya decoys and S8000 Banderol missile-carrying drones, along with a newer jet-powered drone variant that flies faster and is harder to intercept. Air defenses shot down or jammed 409 of the drones tracked in the immediate overnight window, the Air Force said.

The heaviest confirmed impacts fell along the rail corridor near Ukraine’s border with Poland. A Russian drone struck the locomotive of a passenger train in the Volyn region, about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from the border, early Sunday. Ukrzaliznytsia, the state rail operator, said its threat-monitoring teams detected the danger and warned the crew beforehand, and no casualties were reported. “The enemy struck the locomotive of a passenger train,” the operator said.

A separate chartered train carrying former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and senior European security officials was halted on the same route around 5 a.m. and partially evacuated as a precaution. The group, which included a top security adviser to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and security advisers from the U.K., France and Italy, was returning to Poland from the Yalta European Strategy conference in Kyiv. Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, traveling in the same corridor, said his train was not the one struck. “This wasn’t our train, but the one just minutes after us,” he said.

Poland’s defense minister, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, said Polish radar tracked drones striking within a few kilometers of the frontier overnight. “One of them struck 1 km from the border with Poland, another 5 km,” he said. Warsaw scrambled F-16 fighters, helicopters and a SAAB airborne early-warning aircraft, and officials said Polish airspace was not breached.

The Dorohusk-Yahodyn border crossing briefly closed after a drone destroyed a truck roughly 800 meters (2,600 feet) from the checkpoint, Polish border guards told Reuters. It reopened after inspections. Other crossings saw temporarily suspended checks before returning to normal.

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said the strikes near the border were meant to send a message to Kyiv’s Western partners. “This is Putin’s terror ‘knocking’ directly on the doors of the EU and NATO,” he wrote, calling for a full trade embargo and expanded sanctions on Russia’s defense sector.

At least nine people were injured in a separate overnight strike on Odesa, according to Serhiy Lysak, head of the city’s military administration. Across the wider 24-hour period, several civilians were killed nationwide and more than 20 others were wounded, Ukrainian officials said.

Molin said Russia is likely to rely increasingly on two tactics in the coming months: jet-powered Geran drones aimed at Kyiv and central Ukraine, and large nighttime groups of standard Geran-2s routed through bad weather along the Belarusian border or through Moldova to strike fixed targets further west. This remains his forecast and has not been independently confirmed.