In a bid to break the Russian Federation’s power grid and plunge industry and cities into blackouts, Ukraine’s bombardment campaign against Kremlin oil and gas infrastructure has widened to blast power substations and electricity transformers across south and west Russia.

In the latest round of Ukrainian attacks, hitting overnight Tuesday-Wednesday, Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) operators flew a reported 10-20 kamikaze robot planes through hundreds of kilometers of Russian airspace to hit the 750 kV Vladimirskaya substation and the transformers inside it, near the city of Vladimir.

It was the second time in a week that Ukrainian drones had hit the facility and set it on fire. Aside from scattered light anti-aircraft fire at the target, the Ukrainian drones seemed to have made their way to the target unimpeded.

The Vladimirskaya substation is a key energy facility transferring electricity from the Volga Hydroelectric Power Plant, the Kostroma Power Plant (natural gas-fired), and the Kalinin Nuclear Power Plant to the cities of Vladimir and Ivanovo and their collective regional populations of at least 750,000 residents, as well as serving as a major electricity source for the greater Moscow power grid.

Civilian video geo-located to the Vladimirskaya station attack recorded an aircraft similar in silhouette to a Ukrainian propeller-driven kamikaze drone, possibly a Bober aircraft, diving in to strike the location of an already-burning fire, a heavy explosion, and images of a night sky lit up by an orange flash. Images from the city showed some districts blacked out.

The Ukrainian strike package transited at least 600 km (373 miles) of Russian Federation airspace to reach its target. According to most observers, the longest-range Ukrainian aerial attack of the war, thus far, travelled at least 1,800 km (1,118 miles) to hit Russia’s Orenburg region, which straddles the southern end of the Ural mountains. The Aug. 8 attack struck and destroyed a major over-the-horizon air defense radar.

Vladimir regional governor Aleksandr Avdeev, in a statement, said work to repair the damage would begin “once the sun rises” and that civilians should “remain calm, all systems for sustaining life are working normally.”

Elsewhere in central Russia, in the vicinity of a thermal power plant in the central Russian city of Oryol, overnight on Tuesday-Wednesday, Ukrainian turbojet- or rocket-propelled drones hit a ground target or targets in a second long-range air raid.

Video published on local social media contained audio of a turbojet engine possibly similar to the engines used in recently developed Ukrainian Peklo (“Hell”: long-range loitering munition or missile-drone) or Flamingo (long-range cruise missile), followed by heavy explosions. Video and still images recorded following the Ukrainian strike showed three fires burning, two of them at least 50 m (55 yards) tall.

The twin Oryel-Vladimir attacks were the latest in a drumbeat of attacks unleashed by Ukraine’s powerful Unmanned Systems Forces (USF) in recent weeks, challenging the Russian state’s capacity to keep the lights on in territory it controls.

Waves of Ukrainian drones numbering 50-60 kamikaze aircraft hit a major substation in the Russia-occupied Donetsk region overnight Monday-Tuesday, blacking out a territory comparable in size to the US state of Michigan or the NATO state of Denmark, and home to 1.8 million civilians.

The Donetsk region shutdown cut power to military manufacturing, Russian army and air force units, and civilian infrastructure and emergency response teams were working to repair the damage, an occupation authority official told local media.

Inside the Russian Federation, that same night, Ukrainian drones struck and set afire three major electricity substations:

• Frolovo station, Volgograd region – 450 km (280 miles) from the Russia-Ukraine border
• Ryslsk substation, Kursk region – 25 km (16 miles) from the border.
• Kstovo station, Nizhnegorod region – 750 km (466 miles) from the border.

Fires and blackouts were reported in towns and cities in the vicinity of all three attacks.

The same night, another Ukrainian attack drone formation reached and set afire a petroleum products processing plant, in Bashkortostan some 1,300 km (808 miles) inside Russia.

Since Oct. 13, according to Kyiv Post counts, Ukrainian strike planners have launched at least 29 separate strikes directly targeting power grid infrastructure inside Russia or occupied Ukrainian territories, with attacks almost always seemingly intended to hit flammable sections of a transformer station to set it afire.

Over the same three-week period Kyiv has launched a total 76 strikes, with the majority of attacks aiming at Russian capacity to process oil and gas products, or export them.

In August and September, Ukraine’s drone and long-range missile forces attacked pieces of the Russian national power grid only about 10% of the time, almost always focusing on oil refineries, military production or military units instead.

Ukraine has carried out at least 146 long-range strikes against targets inside Russia since Kyiv’s late July launch of a strategic bombardment by drone and missile campaign against Kremlin assets, according to data compiled by Kyiv Post.

Power substations and the transformers they use are highly flammable. The most explosive component is mineral oil used for insulation and cooling of equipment. Western substations comparable to the Vladimirskaya station, with four transformers, would normally contain between 50 and 100 tons of explosive cooling oil.

Defeat of Ukraine by bombarding the civilian population to submission has been a Kremlin strategy since October 2022. The main Russian intent in targeting Ukraine’s power grid and civilian heating infrastructure is to break the will of Ukrainian voters to support resistance to Russian invasion, by forcing millions of Ukrainians to suffer winters in cold apartments without water or electricity, analysts say.

In early October 2025, Russian strike planners shifted their strategy to begin targeting Ukrainian power substations. Some major cities suffered blackouts from lost electricity supplies and demand surges. The worst-hit targets were Kyiv, Poltava, Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Odesa and Dnipro.

Vitaly Zaichenko, head of the Ukrainian power distribution company Ukrenergo, in Oct. 17 comments to the ICTV television channel, said: “If in the past it was hundreds of Russian missiles attacking all our energy, now the Russians are attacking specific targets. They are destroying Ukrenergo power transmission stations, the people operating them, and heating infrastructure.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in a daily Vblog published on Oct. 6, told voters and the Kremlin: “The Russians do not understand…(but) they will understand the price of this. Ukraine strikes back, hitting military targets and energy facilities that sell their energy resources. We would gladly not do this. We would gladly wish there were no war, but the Russians do not want that.”

In the past three weeks, the heaviest weight of Ukrainian attacks has fallen on high-capacity (over 200 kV) power transmission nodes in western and central European Russia, particularly Russian regions bordering Ukraine. Industrial regions south of Moscow and the Volga River basin have also been hit.

In most cases, the strikes set fires and cut power to surrounding regions partially, with full service being returned in 24-48 hours. The station hit most often – the Vladimirskaya – has been attacked three times – on Oct. 16 and 25, and most recently overnight Tuesday-Wednesday. The pace of Ukrainian attacks against oil refineries and military targets has not abated, and the current total count of deep attacks since late July and the launch of Ukraine’s bombardment campaign against Russia, stands at 146 separate kamikaze robot aircraft raids, data compiled by Kyiv Post showed.