Russian forces are increasingly transitioning from mass drone swarms to isolated, complex, manually controlled strikes using low altitudes to evade Ukrainian air defenses, a Ukrainian official reported on Saturday, July 18.
Serhiy Beskrestnov, presidential advisor on the development of technological defense areas, stated that Russian operators are manually guiding drones to minimize detection. He released video footage showing a Shahed strike drone descending to an altitude of 22 meters to avoid radar stations and interceptor drones.
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Beskrestnov noted that Ukrainian forces neutralized the threat in the recorded instance but emphasized that the ongoing shifts in Russian tactics require rapid adaptation of countermeasures.
The tactical shift coincides with continued large-scale aerial assaults. Early Saturday morning, July 18, Russian forces launched an attack on Ukraine utilizing 90 drones, including jet-powered Shahed variants, alongside seven missiles consisting of Iskander, Oniks, and Kh-59/69 types.
Ukrainian air defense systems intercepted and destroyed 69 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and one missile.
Continued regional strikes
The latest aerial assault follows a series of Russian strikes targeting civilian and logistics infrastructure across southern and central Ukraine.
On the morning of July 18, a Russian drone attacked a civilian vehicle in the Korabelnyi district of Kherson. The strike injured five individuals, including a 14-year-old boy, two men aged 48 and 45, and two women aged 37 and 52. Medical personnel diagnosed the victims with blast injuries, concussions, and closed craniocerebral trauma. The two men also sustained shrapnel wounds to their extremities.
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These incidents follow widespread attacks on Friday, July 17. Russian forces targeted port facilities in the Odesa region, damaging a Marshall Islands-flagged civilian vessel and injuring four crew members. In the Dnipropetrovsk region, a first-person view (FPV) drone struck an agricultural company bus in Marhanets, killing a 48-year-old man and injuring eight other employees.
Additionally, Russian strikes on July 17 across the Kharkiv and Chernihiv regions resulted in one civilian death and at least 21 injuries, including eight children. In Kharkiv, a missile strike on the Shevchenkivskyi district killed a 40-year-old man and damaged an educational institution, an administrative building, and commercial infrastructure.
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