Ukraine 'wipes out 1,500 Russian soldiers' after Putin rains hell with huge drone attack

Ukraine claims to have killed or injured 1,580 Russian soldiers in the last day, just hours after Vladimir Putin's forces launched a massive drone attack believed to have been the biggest of the war so far.

Kyiv's General Staff also claimed that Ukraine had destroyed 14 Russian tanks, 48 armoured vehicles and an air defence system.

The news comes after the Ukrainian air force said Tuesday that Russia launched 188 drones against most regions of Ukraine in a nighttime blitz. It described it as a record number of drones deployed in a single attack.

According to the Air Force, most of the drones were intercepted, but apartment buildings and critical infrastructure, such as the national power grid, were damaged. No casualties were immediately reported in the 17 targeted regions.

The Russian Defense Ministry, meanwhile, issued a rare official acknowledgement of its assets recently being hit on its soil by U.S.-made ATACMS missiles after President Joe Biden authorised Ukraine to use the longer-range weapons to strike deeper inside Russia.

Russia has been hammering civilian areas of Ukraine with increasingly heavy drone, missile and glide bomb attacks since the middle of the year.

At the same time, Russia's army has largely held the battlefield initiative for the past year. It has been pushing hard in the eastern Donetsk region, where it is making significant tactical advances, according to Western military analysts.

Ukraine faces a difficult winter, with worries about the reliability of the electricity supply amid Russia's attacks and how much U.S. support it can count on next year after President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January.

The Russian Defense Ministry said five U.S.-made Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, missiles were fired at one of its air defence missile systems in Russia's Kursk border region on Saturday.

It said three of the missiles were downed by the Pantsyr short-range air defence systems protecting the position but that two other missiles hit it, injuring an unspecified number of servicemen and damaging the system's radar.

In another attack with ATACMS on Monday, eight of the missiles were launched at the Kursk-Vostochny military air base near Khalino. Seven of them were shot down, and one hit the facility, injuring two servicemen and causing minor damage, the ministry said.