Kharkiv: five wounded, including a four-year-old boy, by a Russian jet drone, as Russia fires an Iskander-M and 88 drones at Ukraine overnight

A Russian jet-powered drone struck Kharkiv’s Osnovianskyi district on the evening of Tuesday, October 27, wounding five people, among them a four-year-old boy. The strike was part of a night attack that Russia launched against Ukraine with one ballistic missile and 88 drones, and which was still continuing in the early hours of Wednesday, October 28.

The tally of the Ukrainian Air Force covers the period from 18:00 on Tuesday. The ballistic missile was of the Iskander-M/S-400 type and was launched from the Taganrog area. The 88 drones included Shaheds (38 of them jet-powered), S8000 Banderol/Dan-T, Gerbera and “Parodiya” decoy drones. They were heading in from the Oryol and Kursk areas of Russia and from Hvardiiske in occupied Crimea.

By 08:00 on Wednesday Ukrainian air defence had shot down or neutralised with electronic warfare 71 drones, 31 of them jet-powered. Fighter aircraft, surface-to-air missile units, electronic warfare and unmanned-systems units and mobile fire groups took part. The Air Force recorded strikes at 8 locations and falling debris at 2. Several drones were still in the air when the tally was published.

Kharkiv regional governor Oleh Synehubov named the wounded: two women aged 32 and 65, a man aged 56 and the four-year-old boy. Three were taken to hospital. Another 65-year-old woman needed help for an acute stress reaction. After the strike a two-storey production building, a two-storey apartment block and a detached house caught fire, while another home and a car were damaged. Ukraine’s State Emergency Service (DSNS) put the wounded at five and described a fire covering 2,500 square metres. Houses, outbuildings and the production building burned, while multi-storey buildings, garages and vehicles were damaged. Firefighters worked with the risk of a new strike on the same area, and the service’s psychologists stayed with the wounded.

In the Dnipropetrovsk region, the head of the regional administration, Oleksandr Hanzha, counted more than ten attacks in four districts, with drones, artillery, an aerial bomb and a missile. Infrastructure was damaged in the Dnipro district, while in the Nikopol area a student dormitory of an educational institution was hit and a fire broke out. Infrastructure in the Piatykhatky and Verkhivtseve communities of the Kamianske district and a home in the Dubovykivka community were also targeted.

In Zaporizhzhia, Ivan Fedorov of the regional Defence Council recorded 846 Russian strikes on 41 settlements in 24 hours. They included 17 air raids, 619 drones, mostly FPVs, four multiple-rocket-launcher attacks and 206 artillery shots. Two people were wounded and there were 69 reports of damage to homes, cars and infrastructure.

The night attack came a few hours after President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on X that since October 14 Russia has launched more than 100 ballistic missiles at Kyiv and the surrounding region. He complained of “significant limitations” on supplies and of delays in air-defence packages, and argued that if partners’ support had stayed equally strong, especially for Patriot, Ukraine would be in a much better position diplomatically too. We covered his remarks in Zelensky: Patriot and NASAMS delays “directly assist” Russia.

On jet-powered drones, the General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces announced on Tuesday that over the past three months the shoot-down rate for Geran-4 averages almost 60% and in some attacks 80%. F-16s, Mirages and MiG-29s play a key role, together with “small air defence”: anti-aircraft guns such as the Gepard and Skynex, interceptor drones and mobile teams with portable air-defence systems.