Ukraine points out Russia’s tactics to overcome Kiev’s air defense system.
Russia used low-flying tactics and sought to reconnoiter the locations of Ukrainian air defense units when targeting Kiev with attack drones, said Mykhailo Shamanov, a spokesman for the Kiev City Military Administration.
“The UAVs approached the city in groups, then dispersed into individual targets before reaching Kiev, flying at very low altitudes to make Ukrainian air defense operations more difficult,” he said.
“They are using exactly the same tactic when the Shahed UAVs were flying low into the city, with attacks coming in waves. The UAVs hover over certain areas, attracting the attention of mobile defense groups,” the spokesman described.
“The main goal is to confuse the air defense units as much as possible. They try to make the maneuver groups move, thus creating corridors for the next attack waves to pass through,” he said, specifying Russia’s wave-by-wave, swarm attack tactics.
Mr. Shamanov added that Russian drones constantly try to identify weak points and locations of Ukrainian air defenses so that subsequent waves of UAVs can exploit the gaps to attack more effectively.
Russia says the attacks on energy infrastructure are aimed at crippling Ukraine’s arms production and Kiev’s ability to deploy new troops to the front line.
In September, President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of destroying all thermal power plants and most of Ukraine’s hydroelectric power generation capacity, affecting 80% of Kiev’s energy production capacity.
The weapon that Russia mainly uses is the Geran UAV (Ukraine and the West suspect that Shahed bought it from Iran).
In late August, Ukrainian Energy Minister German Galushchenko warned that the coming winter would be the most difficult in the Eastern European country’s modern history. He predicted that the country’s electricity output would drop significantly as winter approached.
Ukraine’s grid operator, Ukrenergo, had warned earlier that the scale of damage to the country’s energy network was “extremely large”. Power plants that remained operational were running at maximum capacity, Mr Galushchenko said.
Former Energy and Coal Industry Minister Ivan Plachkov also predicted that this winter could be disastrous for Ukraine and advised people to seek shelter at the homes of acquaintances in settlements with wood-burning stoves.
Ukrainians are advised to start looking for homes that they can heat without electricity.
Kiev authorities have repeatedly called on residents to save electricity, while state energy company Ukrenergo has imposed restrictions on power supplies to industrial consumers.
