An adviser on military technology to President Volodymyr Zelensky reported spotting what appeared to be a purpose-built explosive device in the debris left by a recent Russian drone attack. Beskrestnov — appointed to his post by Zelensky in July and known by the call sign "Flash" — told reporters that one of the recovered drones appeared to be fitted with a purpose-built warhead designed to sever heavy metal structures, including reinforced pylons and bridges, and that in his assessment the opposing force was positioning itself to target high-voltage transmission lines.
That announcement came on the same date that the defence ministry in Moscow released a statement saying its troops had targeted a series of energy and power facilities in and around Kyiv — among them a hydroelectric plant, a thermal power station, a high-voltage substation, and a battery-storage park. In a separate announcement, Russian authorities stated that the De Novo data centre in Kyiv had been hit, characterising the facility as a node through which substantial volumes of internet traffic are routed.
Over the course of several years, Russian forces have conducted sustained military operations aimed at forcing Ukraine to capitulate. Russian drone capabilities have grown in speed, precision, and resistance to countermeasures, with Moscow directing strikes at the infrastructure networks that underpin Ukraine's day-to-day functioning.
According to Beskrestnov, the recovered jet-powered drone carried a warhead he described as "cumulative-cutting" in nature — a 40-kilogram primary explosive charge paired with four separate attachment modules — a configuration designed to concentrate blast energy against dense metal surfaces rather than spreading the force across a wider area. The document Beskrestnov cited describes a jet-propelled unmanned device built to sever the transmission pylons that anchor Ukraine's high-voltage electricity network — a finding that, as yet, no outside technical body has independently verified.
Speaking on 22 August, Putin stated that strikes on Russian commercial and logistics infrastructure — including facilities serving retailers such as Wildberries and Ozon — had unleashed consequences that could not be contained, and he put Ukraine on notice that its economy's most vulnerable sectors stood to face a response. Eight days on, the defence ministry had notified that it was tasked with drawing up targeting plans for attacks on Ukrainian power infrastructure at scale, and roughly a month later Putin offered public confirmation of that directive.
Kyivstar — the mobile carrier holding the distinction of being both Ukraine's largest and the first Ukrainian company to list on a US stock exchange — sustained multiple attacks. On 11 September, a drone strike hit the company's engineering office in Kyiv — the opening blow in a string of attacks that went on to affect multiple facilities, among them the organisation's main Kyiv site. Infrastructure serving multiple internet providers and data centres sustained damage in separate incidents.
Four Ukrainian telecommunications and data infrastructure operators — Vodafone Ukraine, Datagroup, Ukrtelecom, and De Novo — were named in statements from the Russian Defence Ministry as targets of deliberate strike operations, with those statements framing each provider as a node in a military communications network. According to Datagroup, both its customer records and operational services remained intact throughout the disruption, sustained by backup infrastructure the company had put in place ahead of time — an approach that, the company noted, reflected a broader pattern of resilience planning adopted across Ukrainian organisations, both public and private.
In the period leading up to the large-scale military offensive of 2022, Ukrainian authorities revised their data-storage regulations to permit government records to be held on servers abroad, with dozens of agencies subsequently migrating their databases and operational systems onto Amazon Web Services infrastructure. When a missile struck the National Data Backup Centre in Kyiv on 1 March 2022, none of the country's core state registers or key government services were taken offline, according to a statement from the presidential office.
Following a series of strikes targeting data infrastructure in Kyiv, Zelensky gathered senior military advisers to examine ways of strengthening the protection of communications-related facilities; by July, roughly 1.8 gigawatts of distributed gas generation capacity had been deployed across the country, with output spread among numerous smaller local units rather than concentrated in large centralised plants. Portable power plants, cogeneration units, boilers, and transformers have been spread across multiple locations in a distributed network, ready to keep energy flowing whenever larger facilities go offline.
DTEK, which holds the position of Ukraine's largest privately owned energy company, reports that its thermal generation facilities have come under attack on more than 230 separate occasions, with the bulk of its production capacity having been knocked out and restored from the ground up at least three times across the period since the full-scale war began.
Described at the time as little more than a jet engine grafted onto an older propeller-driven airframe, the Geran-3 nonetheless became the first jet-powered drone Russia deployed at scale. Mechanical shortcomings left it prone to breaking down, and the forces generated during high-speed manoeuvres exceeded what it could tolerate. Manufacturing efforts pivoted toward the purpose-built Geran-4 and Geran-5 drone variants in the period that followed.
The smaller Geran-4 drone maintains a cruising velocity of roughly 220 mph, with a peak of over 300 mph, whereas the larger Geran-5 variant tops out near 370 mph and is fitted to carry a 90-kilogram warhead. Onboard sensors cover both electro-optical detection and electronic warfare countermeasures.
Repeated volleys of projectiles have left civilians dead while the sheer number of incoming weapons has stretched air-defence systems beyond their capacity to respond. On Monday, a coordinated attack combining jet aircraft and drone-delivered munitions struck the Presidium building of Ukraine's National Academy of Sciences in central Kyiv, killing two people and igniting fires that spread across the upper floors of the structure.
