Ukrainian drones are regularly hitting targets deep inside Russia, reaching to the Ural Mountains and communities where most people had seen the war as a distant problem.
A residential high-rise in Yekaterinburg, home to more than 1.5 million people, was struck on April 25, the first damage that city has suffered since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Since early last month, authorities have temporarily suspended operations at the local airport on five separate days to respond to drone threats.
Photo: AFP
“This came as a shock,” said Vladimir, a 35-year-old businessman in Yekaterinburg, who declined to give his full name due to security concerns. “Even though no one was killed, people finally realized the city is no longer deep in the rear.”
The strike carries particular symbolism for Yekaterinburg, which was long seen as beyond the reach of war. The city, known as Sverdlovsk in Soviet times, lies on the eastern side of the Urals about 1,700km from the Ukrainian border and served as a rear base during World War II, when factories were moved there for safety because it was considered to be outside the range for attacks from Europe.
Until this year, Russia’s aviation watchdog Rosaviatsia had not reported any drone incidents around the airport.
With the war along the front lines largely at a stalemate, drones are playing an increasingly central role. Both combatants now strike each other’s cities with hundreds of uncrewed aerial vehicles daily.
Ukraine, in particular, is becoming more effective with its campaign, hitting Russian refineries, fertilizer plants and ports used to export energy, all of which cuts into the Kremlin’s revenue and limits its ability to benefit from higher prices driven by the Middle East conflict.
Kyiv plans to expand long-range strikes, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a social media post on Wednesday last week.
Ukraine now has the ability to strike Russia at distances of more than 1,500km, he said.
That makes a quarter of Russian territory — where more than 70 percent of its population of 146 million live — reachable by Ukrainian drones.
Recent strikes suggest Kyiv is already putting that into practice. On the same day that drones hit Yekaterinburg, Ukraine struck several Sukhoi Su-57 and Su-34 aircraft at Russia’s Shagol air base in the Chelyabinsk region, Ukraine’s General Staff said earlier this month.
Russia did not comment on the attack, while the local governor said that drones had targeted an “infrastructure facility.”
Chelyabinsk, in the southern Urals near the border with Kazakhstan, lies about 1,500 to 1,700km from Ukraine. The regional capital has a population of about 1.2 million people and, like Yekaterinburg, was a pillar of Soviet heavy industry during World War II, earning the nickname “Tankograd” after much of the Soviet tank industry was relocated to there. It remains an important center for metallurgy, military and aerospace industries.
The city has become a regular target for Ukrainian drones since the beginning of last month, according to data on flight suspensions at the local airport, reported by Rosaviatsia.
Last week, drones also caused a fire and damaged a primary processing unit at Lukoil PJSC’s Permnefteorgsintez refinery in the Perm region, another area of the Urals, about 1,500km from the border. A day earlier, a pumping station near the facility was also hit. Parts of Perm were shrouded in black smoke, with residents reporting “black rain.”
Perm saw only a handful of drone incidents last year, but this year authorities have already had to shut the city’s airport for several hours on about 15 days to repel drones. Seven of those disruptions have occurred since the start of last month.
To be sure, Ukrainian drones have been regularly targeting the Orenburg region on the southern edge of the Urals for more than a year, but it is closer to the Ukrainian border, even if still 1,200km away.
Last year, drones were also detected in the oil-rich Tyumen region of Siberia, about 2,000km from the border, but that appears to have been a one-off incident and remains the farthest known reach of a Ukrainian drone.
The Kremlin has so far had a muted reaction to the attacks in the Urals. Russian President Vladimir Putin regularly receives briefings, including on Kyiv’s attacks and the measures taken in response by Russian authorities, his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters after drones hit a complex in Yekaterinburg.
Aside from the economic damage, longer-range strikes risk affecting public sentiment at a time when Russians are already feeling worn down by the war and its consequences. Authorities have responded to the drone attacks with measures that include temporarily shutting down mobile and, at times, landline Internet in cities.
Drones reaching the Urals and Internet restrictions are both adding to general fatigue, said Andrei Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based political analyst.
“People adapt to everything, but, there is growing fatigue, turning into irritation,” he said.
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