Zelensky after fresh drone night: 1,400 in a single week

For Belgrade, which still clings to military neutrality and refuses to sanction Moscow, every new tally out of Kyiv is not just distant war statistics but a reminder of how fragile the balance is that Serbian foreign policy relies on when it talks about energy, refugees and Brussels’ pressure to take a clearer side. After another night defined by swarms of drones, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has released a weekly overview of Russian strikes showing that the intensity of the attacks is not easing, despite diplomatic talk of a possible truce.

According to his statement, overnight on June 27 Russian forces sent 129 drones at targets across the country, and Ukrainian air defense shot down or electronically jammed 113 of them. It is a pattern that repeats almost every night, with the same consequences for civilian infrastructure and the same conclusion from Kyiv: that a systematic build-up of air defense and continued military aid from the United States are the precondition without which these attacks cannot be stopped.

What the weekly tally actually shows

Zelensky added up the figures for seven days, and they map out the scale of the campaign. Over that period, he said, Russia used about 1,400 drones, nearly 1,500 guided aerial bombs and 19 missiles of various types, hitting as many as 15 Ukrainian regions. Border and front-line areas bear the heaviest burden, so Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv and Sumy come under fire almost daily, keeping residents on permanent alert and straining early-warning systems.

Guided aerial bombs, ever more precise thanks to glide kits, have become a particular burden for cities near the front line, because they are hard to intercept with the means at hand. That is precisely why Kyiv insists on deliveries of modern air-defense missiles and on intelligence-sharing, stressing that the figures alone say nothing about human losses or the damage to the power grid, measured in days without electricity and water in some municipalities.

Is Kyiv changing the math with refinery strikes?

Alongside defending its own sky, the Ukrainian military is intensifying deep strikes on Russian territory, above all on refineries and energy facilities. The goal is clear: to disrupt the fuel supply chain that funds and powers the Russian war machine, and the effects are already felt through outages at processing plants and local shortages. The war is thus increasingly carried into the Russian interior, shifting how the conflict is perceived among a population used to viewing the front as something far away.

For European chancelleries this development opens a double question. On one hand, weakening the Russian energy sector serves the logic of the sanctions regime that Brussels has maintained for years. On the other, every spike in oil and fuel prices is felt across the Western Balkans markets, including in Serbia, where supply via the Adriatic route and Russian ownership in the oil industry has been a sensitive subject of negotiation for years. Zelensky’s message is that pressure on the sources of Russian revenue is the only language the Kremlin understands, while Moscow answers with new waves of drones, leaving the war’s arithmetic to a contest over who exhausts the other first.

The question that remains for the reader is how long Europe, and Serbia within it, can balance between energy dependence and political pressure while the sky over Ukraine fills with drones every night. How do you see Belgrade’s position in this deepening conflict?