Ukraine Attacked With 'Record' 192 Drones, Missiles As NATO Gauges Russia's New Weapon

A Ukrainian soldier shows a Russian drone with a thermobaric charge that was downed in Ukraine in November.

Russia overnight launched 188 drones and four cruise missiles at targets in Ukraine -- a record number of projectiles in a single attack, Kyiv's air force said, as NATO and Ukrainian envoys prepared to gather in Brussels to assess Moscow's launching last week of an experimental missile at a Ukrainian city.

Ukrainian air-defense systems "tracked 192 air targets -- four Iskander ballistic missiles and 188 enemy drones," the air force said in a message on Telegram.

It added that 76 Russian drones were shot down over 17 Ukrainian regions, while another 95 drones "were lost in location" after their navigation systems had been jammed by Ukrainian electronic warfare systems. Five more drones changed course and flew toward Belarus, it said.

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No casualties were immediately reported in any of the 17 regions targeted, but critical infrastructure facilities such as the country's power grid and high-rise apartment buildings were damaged in several regions, officials said.

During the attack, the western Ukrainian city of Ternopil was temporarily left without electricity.

For the past several months, Russia has been battering Ukrainian cities with increasingly heavy drone, missile, and glide bomb strikes, causing casualties and damaging energy infrastructure as the cold season settles in.

In Brussels, a meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Council (NUC) is to discuss on November 26 Russia's launching of an experimental hypersonic intermediate-range missile at Ukraine last week.

The NUC was established at a NATO summit in Vilnius last year to step up the alliance's collaboration with Kyiv and support Ukraine's aspirations for NATO membership.

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The NUC meeting of envoys from Ukraine and the 32 member states of the alliance was called by Kyiv after Russia on November 21 struck the Ukrainian city of Dnipro with what President Vladimir Putin said was a new missile called Oreshnik.

Putin said the move was part of Moscow's response to Ukrainian attacks on Russian soil with U.S.-supplied ATACMS and British-supplied Storm Shadow missiles.

Putin said the Oreshnik is new and not an upgrade of previous Soviet-designed weaponry. The United States said the new missile is "experimental" and based on Russia’s RS-26 Rubezh intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

Ukraine initially accused Russia of having used an ICBM in the Dnipro attack. An ICBM has never been used in a war.