Kyiv: Ukraine launched more than 1,000 drones at targets across Russia overnight, in what officials described as the largest-ever drone attack of the war, with an oil refinery reported among the sites hit.

The massive wave of unmanned aircraft targeted infrastructure deep inside Russian territory, marking a dramatic escalation in Ukraine’s long-range strike campaign.

Drone warfare has become a defining feature of the conflict, with both sides deploying swarms of low-cost unmanned aircraft to strike energy facilities, military bases, and logistics hubs far from the front lines.

Striking Russia’s energy backbone

Oil refineries have become a favoured target for Ukrainian strikes. By hitting fuel production and storage, Kyiv aims to squeeze the revenues and logistics that fund and sustain Russia’s war effort.

Previous Ukrainian drone attacks have forced temporary shutdowns at Russian refineries and driven up domestic fuel prices. A strike of this scale could compound those effects, though the full damage is still being assessed.

An escalating drone war

The sheer number of drones involved, over a thousand in a single night, underlines how central unmanned systems have become to modern warfare. Cheap to produce and hard to intercept in large numbers, drone swarms can overwhelm even sophisticated air defences.

Russia has responded to earlier Ukrainian strikes with its own waves of drones and missiles against Ukrainian cities and energy infrastructure, and retaliation for an attack of this size is widely expected.

As the war grinds on, both sides are betting that long-range strikes can break the other’s will and capacity to fight. Whether this record attack achieves that, or simply invites a fiercer response, will become clear in the days ahead. Military analysts say such record-scale attacks test the limits of air defence on both sides. As winter approaches, the battle for energy infrastructure is likely to intensify, raising the stakes for civilians far from the front lines.