Zelensky Says Russia Fired 2,000 Drones and 19 Missiles at Ukraine in a Week, as Kyiv Hits Third Russian Refinery in Days

Since Ukrainian drones killed two people near Moscow and set an oil refinery ablaze on the final day of Russia's parliamentary election Sunday, Sept. 20, both governments have released fuller tallies of a week with heavy exchanges of strikes since Russia's 2022 invasion.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Facebook and X that Russia launched more than 2,000 attack drones, roughly 1,700 aerial bombs, and 19 missiles at Ukraine over the past seven days, according to Kyiv Post and ua.news. Zelensky said most of the drones were jet-powered variants that fly faster and are harder for ground-based air defenses to stop.

The targets, Zelensky said, spanned Kharkiv, Sumy, Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, Vinnytsia, Kyiv, Zhytomyr and Cherkasy regions. Ukrainian Air Force officials said a separate overnight barrage into Sunday involved 138 drones launched from four vectors, including Shahed-type loitering munitions, Gerbera drones and Parodiya decoys. Air defense units said they shot down or jammed 101 of them, with impacts recorded at 17 locations, according to Kyiv Post.

Casualties on both sides

On the Ukrainian side, Tymur Tkachenko, head of the Kyiv region military administration, said overnight strikes into Sunday killed three children and one woman, according to CNN. In Odesa, a Saturday drone strike destroyed the upper floors of a residential high-rise, killing two and injuring 26, regional head Oleh Kiper said. A follow-up overnight attack injured at least nine more in the port city, according to Serhii Lysak, head of the Odesa military administration, as reported by the Associated Press and carried by Breitbart.

In Kherson region, a Russian first-person-view drone struck a men's monastery in the village of Chervonyi Mayak on Saturday, killing a 71-year-old priest and injuring four other clergymen, ages 31 to 53, according to Oleksandr Prokudin, head of the Kherson Regional Military Administration. Separately, Russian artillery hit Kramatorsk on Sunday morning, killing one person, according to Censor.net. Mykola Karpiuk, a civil society activist and former Kremlin political prisoner, was reported killed on the front line, also per Censor.net.

On the Russian side, two people were killed and 20 injured, including three children, in the Moscow region drone attack, according to regional governor Andrei Vorobyov. Separately, two civilians died in Nizhnekamsk, a city in Tatarstan, after a drone hit a tree near their parked car, according to the office of regional head Rustam Minnikhanov, as reported by the Associated Press. Nizhnekamsk hosts a major cluster of Russian oil refineries and petrochemical plants.

Refineries hit in Moscow, Tatarstan and Krasnodar

Ukraine's General Staff said its main target in the weekend's largest strike was the Gazpromneft-Moscow Oil Refinery in the capital's Kapotnya district, one of Russia's largest by volume, according to Censor.net and CNN. Ukraine's Defense Intelligence agency also claimed a strike on a refinery in Slavyansk-on-Kuban in Russia's Krasnodar region, saying it hit a processing unit and tank farm and sparked a blaze visible for miles. Krasnodar authorities confirmed three people were injured and a pipeline was damaged but did not directly respond to Ukraine's specific claims about the refinery, according to the Associated Press.

Ukraine has focused repeated long-range strikes on Russia's oil and gas sector, which Kyiv says funds and fuels the war, and the campaign has caused fuel rationing in parts of Russia despite the country being a major oil exporter, per AP reporting carried by Breitbart.

Disputed shoot-down numbers and the election framing

Russian officials gave inconsistent figures for drones intercepted over the weekend. Russia's Ministry of Defense said it shot down 1,110 Ukrainian drones overnight nationwide, including over Crimea and the Black Sea, according to CNN. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin separately said 450 drones were destroyed en route to the capital alone and that more than 1,600 had been downed across Russia since Saturday. A separate Associated Press count cited by Breitbart put the overnight shoot-down total at 389.

Sobyanin also said the attack "was clearly planned with the aim of disrupting the elections" and declared "the enemy did not succeed." Zelensky's own statements on the strike did not mention the election at all, framing the targets instead as facilities funding "the war machine," according to CNN. Sunday marked the third and final day of Russia's first parliamentary elections since its 2022 invasion. CNN reported that Vladimir Putin's United Russia party was widely expected to win in the absence of any credible opposition, and that voting was also held in four Ukrainian regions Russia has annexed but does not fully control. Russian officials separately claimed a cyberattack targeted Moscow's electronic voting system during the vote, an allegation that has not been independently verified.

Zelensky used the strikes to renew his call for new sanctions, telling international partners that "the United States has the means to do this, Europe has them, and so does every G7 country." No new sanctions package has been announced by the U.S., EU or G7 in response. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha, on a visit to Iceland, discussed accelerating a bilateral drone-production agreement with his Icelandic counterpart, Torgerdur Katrín Gunnarsdóttir, according to Censor.net, though no signing date has been set.