Voronezh: governor reports two dead and 17 injured in a mass Ukrainian drone attack, with debris hitting a train

Two dead and 17 injured, among them a child, is the toll of the mass overnight Ukrainian drone attack on Voronezh in Russia, according to the region’s governor, Alexander Gusev. A significant number of the injured were on a train, onto which debris from an unmanned aircraft fell.

According to Gusev, air defence detected and destroyed 113 drones from the evening of Sunday, October 25 until the early hours of Monday, October 26 over the Voronezh urban area and several other districts of the region, with more than 70 shot down over the city itself. The dead are two men, born in 1960 and 1973. The train was moving through the suburbs of the left bank of the river when the debris hit it, and many of the injured were there, among them two in serious condition. Russian Railways reported, on first information, that at Somovo station a carriage of passenger train No. 11 Anapa–Moscow was damaged and five passengers were injured. The governor described the attack as “terrorist”.

Damage to facades and windows is recorded in almost all districts of Voronezh. Gusev also reported fires at several industrial enterprises, without serious consequences, as well as at a business centre in the city centre, an apartment block, two dacha settlements, a school sports ground and a garage complex. He also asked residents not to post online photos and videos of air defence in action, especially when the location can be seen. All of this comes from the Russian side and has not been independently verified.

The drone alert sounded in the region shortly before 22:00 Moscow time on Sunday. Less than an hour later an immediate threat was declared for Voronezh, Novovoronezh and the Liski and Ostrogozhsk districts, and during the night the alert extended farther south and east, to Borisoglebsk. That is where the air base is located that Ukraine struck with a Long Neptune missile on the night of October 15. Shortly before 06:00 a missile-attack danger was also declared, which ended after about two hours.

Russia’s overnight attack on Ukraine

The same night Russia attacked Ukraine with a Kh-31P anti-radar missile, three Kh-59/69 guided air-to-surface missiles from the occupied areas of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, and 140 Shahed-type drones (half of them jet-powered), Gerbera drones and “Parodiya” decoys. Ukraine’s Air Force reported that by 08:00 the three Kh-59/69 and 112 drones had been shot down or neutralised, while strikes were recorded at 15 locations and debris falls at four.

In Zaporizhzhia, private homes, cars and a commercial building were hit, and a fire broke out at one of the strike sites, with four injured (two women aged 22 and 30 and two men aged 40 and 61); in the morning another strike hit a shopping centre that had already closed. In the Khmelnytskyi region an energy facility in the Kamianets-Podilskyi area was damaged, causing emergency power cuts, while in the Odesa region there were repeated attacks on a private industrial enterprise and a garage complex, with large fires and no casualties. The new Russian attack follows the strike on Kyiv with three ballistic missiles with cluster warheads in the early hours of October 22.

The Russian Ministry of Defence claimed that it struck a depot for long- and medium-range drones at Olshany in the Kharkiv region, the 330 kV “Zaliutyne” substation in Kharkiv, a 330 kV substation in Kamianets-Podilskyi, loading facilities at three piers of the port of Chornomorsk and four warehouses with military and dual-use cargo, as well as a cargo ship that, according to Moscow, was carrying military material to Odesa.