Russia launched a barrage of drones over various regions of Ukraine on New Year’s Eve that kept the Ukrainian anti-aircraft defense systems on alert until early Monday morning, in the largest attack with this type of device since the beginning of the war almost two years ago.

“The powerful massive drone attack lasted 11 hours. “The kamikaze drones were launched in the afternoon and the anti-aircraft defense finished its work around 04:00 local time (02:00 GMT),” the Southern Defense Forces command said on its Telegram channel.

The Ukrainian Air Force (FAU) stressed that “the enemy used a record number of unmanned aerial vehicles Iranian Shahed” type of attack. In total, Russia launched 90 drones fixed-wing missiles and four S-300 anti-aircraft guided missiles over Ukraine, as well as three Kh-31P anti-radar missiles and one Kh-59, he said.

The missiles attacked Kharkiv (east), Kherson and Zaporizhzhia (south)while the drones aimed Mikolayiv (south), Vinitsia (central-west), Dnipropetrovsk (center), Kherson and the region of Kirovohrad (center), in addition to Lviv (west).

“Thank you all very much for your combative work. A year ago on New Year’s Eve, the defenders of the sky destroyed 45 Shahed drones. Today there were 87! We defend the sky! Together towards victory!“FAU Commander-in-Chief Lieutenant General Miloka Oleschuk wrote on Telegram.

Zelensky promises to make Russia feel “the wrath of domestic production” of weapons

In his New Year’s Eve message, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, assured that “next year the enemy will feel the wrath of national production” of weapons and that the country will have at least one million FPV drones, piloted with remote vision. “We will use everything generously. On land, in the sky and, of course, in the sea,” the president promised.

The president of Russia, Vladimir Putinin his first public reaction to the Ukrainian attack last Saturday against the border city of Belgorod, which claimed 25 dead and more than a hundred injuredwarned that this will not go unpunished.

“It was a direct attack against the civilian population. Of course It was a terrorist attack. It cannot be described any other way,” the Kremlin chief said in a meeting with military personnel at a hospital on the outskirts of Moscow.

He assured that the attack on Belgorod “will not go unpunished100%, there can be no doubt” and that “everything boils over” himself, but he stressed that Russia responds by hitting military targets.

Putin: “We don’t want to fight forever”

“It’s what we do. We are doing it. We attack with high-precision weapons the places where decisions are made, concentrations of military, mercenaries and other similar centers, military objectives, in the first place. And They are sensitive attacks. We will continue to do so,” Putin said.

He stressed that on the battlefield the initiative is “practically” in the hands of the Russian military, who – he said – have weapons that “no army in the world has.”

“We don’t want to fight forever, but we are not willing to give up our positions either,” said the Russian president, who assured that Russia also wants to end the conflict as soon as possible, as long as it is on its terms. He insisted that the essence of the problem does not lie in Ukraine, “but in those who, using Ukraine, try to destroy Russia. And that is ruled out, absolutely ruled out.”

“Ukraine itself is not our enemy, but those who want to destroy the Russian statethose who want to achieve, as they say, the strategic defeat of Russia on the battlefield, and they are mainly in the West,” he explained.

At the same time, Putin indicated that there are those in the West who sympathize with Russia, but there are also “so-called eliteswho consider the existence of Russia in its current quality and its current size to be unacceptable.