Drone strikes on Russia’s regions reached record levels this year, with an average of 11 crashing or striking their targets daily

Despite hopes of a peace agreement as the war in Ukraine nears the end of its fourth year, hostilities have not eased in 2025 and are increasingly affecting both Ukrainians and Russians. The number of drone strikes on Russia rose by at least a third this year, an analysis of war-related reports by Novaya Gazeta Europe has found.

Missile attacks on Russian territory, however, have almost stopped, following a decline in international military aid to Ukraine.

Novaya Europe has selected posts on Telegram news channels reporting military activity in Russia and annexed Crimea since the beginning of 2022. Events were divided into categories and duplicate reports were removed to identify unique incidents.

In 2025, some 8,300 military incidents were recorded in Russia. Of these, 48% — around 4,000 — were drone attacks, while 41%, or 3,400, involved drones being intercepted by air defences.

Missile and artillery strikes accounted for roughly 3%, or about 250 incidents, and ground combat operations for 7%, or about 560 events. The remaining events were naval attacks and air strikes.

How we calculated

Military events were identified using the Gemini 2.0 Flash language model, which extracted information such as location, category and a brief description of the events. Each event was then checked to ensure the type of action and region were mentioned in the source text. After selecting 314,000 posts about military events using a separate de-duplication algorithm, only incidents reported by at least two sources were included. The analysis covers the period from 1 January 2022 to 25 November 2025.

Drone strikes on the rise

The number of drone attacks in which the drones were either shot down or reached their targets in Russia rose by 33% by November 2025, compared to the same period last year. The number of drones shot down increased by 52%, continuing a steady upward trend seen throughout the war.

On average, about 11 drones either crashed or hit their target per day in 2025, while a further nine were shot down by air defences. Drone strikes have been recorded in at least 49 Russian regions this year, as well as in annexed Crimea and Sevastopol.

Some attacks reached deep into Russia, making it as far as Siberia, with damage reported at an oil refinery in the Tyumen region on 6 October. In another case, drones were launched from a truck to attack the Belaya airbase in the Irkutsk region, the region farthest from Ukraine to have been affected, as part of Operation Spider’s Web devised by Ukraine’s security services.

Most incidents, however, occurred in border regions: the Belgorod region accounted for 57% of all drone attacks in 2025. Almost 300 attacks — 7% of the total — were recorded in the Kursk region, followed by the Bryansk, Krasnodar and Rostov regions.

Drone attacks, at around 4,000 incidents this year, outnumbered all other forms of attack combined, including missile and air strikes, ground combat and naval operations.

In cases where the drones were not intercepted, injuries were reported in 34% of incidents, a figure largely unchanged from last year. Damage was recorded in 85% of cases. Overall, about 1,800 military incidents in Russia in 2025 resulted in injuries.

Down with missiles

Compared to 2024, the number of missile attacks and bombings has fallen by more than threefold this year, while attacks at sea have halved.

The reduction began in March, when Ukraine’s Western allies sharply cut back their supply of missiles. Around the same time, ground assaults on Russian territory largely ceased, with Russian forces regaining control over the western Kursk region. Since then, there have only been border clashes.

Military analyst and Ukrainian reserve colonel Roman Svitan said the decrease in missile strikes reflected the depletion of Western-supplied weapons. Stocks of ATACMS, Storm Shadow and Scalp missiles supplied in 2024 were largely exhausted by spring 2025, Svitan added, leaving only emergency reserves, some of which were used in Ukrainian strikes on Russia’s Voronezh and Bryansk regions this autumn.

Ukraine is increasingly relying on domestically produced drones and missiles to strike Russia, said Oleksandr Kovalenko, a Ukrainian military and political observer. “Their production is based on Western technology, and includes foreign components, but is effectively Ukrainian,” Kovalenko added.

Oil is king

In August, Ukraine resumed attacks on Russia’s oil refining infrastructure after a lull that coincided with peace talks beginning in March. But this time, the most affected areas were not border regions but the southern Krasnodar region, followed by the Saratov and Samara regions, and then annexed Crimea, where many Russian oil refineries are located.

Svitan suggested the earlier pause may have reflected Washington’s concerns about rising global oil prices, which appear to have eased by August. Svitan expects the number of attacks on the Russian oil industry to increase in 2026.

Earlier reports by Novaya Europe said Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries had led to a 10% decrease in refining by October, while Russia’s oil and gas revenues fell by 21% between January and October compared to the same period last year.

Although negotiations on a ceasefire and a peace deal between Moscow and Kyiv are underway, both sides continue to target each other’s infrastructure. If the war continues into 2026, analysts say attacks on Russia’s oil and energy sector are likely to intensify as Ukraine scales up its drone and missile production, and Western allies remain willing to provide new long-range weapons.