Ukraine discovered the difference in Russia’s attack on the night of March 31 and the early morning of April 1.
For the first time in nearly five months, Russia did not deploy unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to attack Shahed in Ukraine on the night of March 31. Instead, Russia used cruise missiles and guided bombs, Ukraine said.
“There were no UAV attacks. We are still monitoring it, it doesn’t mean anything at the moment,” Andriy Kovalenko, head of the Center for Countering Disinformation at the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, wrote on Telegram.
Ukrainska Pravda commented that the night of March 31 to April 1 became the first night in 2025 when Russia did not launch a large-scale suicide UAV attack on Ukraine.
According to the Ukrainian Air Force, two Kh-59/69 guided missiles were intercepted.
“At about 9:00 p.m. on March 31, Russia launched two Kh-59/69 guided missiles from tactical aircraft in the direction of Zaporizhia,” the Ukrainian Air Force said.
The last time Russia did not use UAVs in an attack was on the morning of December 10, 2024. Before that, it was October 14, 2024. In April 2024, Russia also went several days without deploying Shahed in attacks on Ukraine.
Despite the pause in drone attacks, Russia continued intense air strikes overnight, dropping glide bombs along the border in the Sumy region as well as in Zaporizhia and Donetsk, Ukraine said.
Meanwhile, the military head of the Dnipropetrovsk region, Serhiy Lysak, accused the Russian army of attacking Nikopol with fire, damaging infrastructure.
According to Kyiv Post, the missile attacks may predict a change in Russia’s tactics in the coming time in the context that Moscow and Kiev have agreed to stop attacking each other’s energy infrastructure.
However, both sides have repeatedly accused each other of violating the ceasefire, although the intensity of attacks has decreased in recent times.
Ukraine believes that Russia’s temporary halt to Shahed attacks may be due to Moscow’s desire to stockpile resources to carry out large-scale attacks in the future.
Russia has repeatedly warned that if Ukraine violates the 30-day ceasefire banning attacks on energy infrastructure, Moscow reserves the right to respond strongly.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha, speaking at a joint press conference with his Lithuanian counterpart Kēstutis Budris, accused Russia of continuing to violate the “energy truce”.
According to him, in the early morning of April 1, Russian shelling damaged an energy facility in Kherson, leaving 45,000 households without electricity.
“After the conference in Riyadh, one of the agreements with the US was not to attack energy infrastructure. However, Russia continues to violate this agreement,” Sybiha accused.
He also said that after the negotiations, energy facilities in Kharkov and Poltava were also attacked.
The Ukrainian General Staff reported 216 clashes across the entire front in the past 24 hours, indicating that fighting remains fierce.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) has assessed that Russia is unlikely to agree to an unconditional ceasefire across the entire front in the next three weeks. The Kremlin has demanded that any temporary truce – such as in the Black Sea – be conditional on Moscow getting concessions from the West on sanctions.
Just a day earlier, on the night of March 30, Russia launched a large-scale air attack, deploying 131 Shahed UAVs and decoy UAVs from various directions.
By 9am on March 31, Ukrainian forces confirmed that they had shot down 57 Shahed UAVs in the north, east and centre of the country. In addition, 45 Russian decoy UAVs had crashed, according to Ukraine.
The attack affected several regions, including Sumy, Donetsk, Kharkov, Kiev and Zhytomyr.
