Anatomy of the Friday the 13th Airstrike – Part 2: How Russia Bombarded Ukraine One Night
Overall shoot-down rates were around 90 percent, but several Kremlin ballistic missiles and kamikaze drones broke through tough Ukrainian defenses to kill six civilians and injure dozens.
Kyiv Post
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This is the second part of a two-part series (click here for part 1)covering a single Russian mass missile/drone strike on Ukraine, how the Kremlin strike packages attacked and how Ukraine air defenses fought back.
Russia overnight on March 13-14 launched a reported 430+ drone and 68 missile mass attack concentrating heavily on the city of Kyiv – but fortunately for residents of the Ukrainian capital the national air defense network mostly chewed up the Kremlin strike packages as they approached.
By the standards of Ukraine’s experience after four years of war , the Russian attack was still a bad one partly due to missile hits to power grid infrastructure, but above all because six civilians were killed and dozens more injured by Russian weapons.
The backbone of the Kremlin’s attack was missiles. The most advanced were a pair of Zircon hypersonic cruise missiles launched from Crimea and flying at more than five times the speed of sound, making interception almost impossible.
The Russian airstrike’s main punch was thirteen ballistic missiles, according to Ukrainian military sources a mix of modern Iskander-M missiles and S-400 (NATO: SA-21) anti-aircraft missiles reconfigured to hit ground targets.
These were fired from Russia’s Bryansk region and flew in a parabola nearly reaching space before they ballistically arch over to accelerate aligned with gravity to a near-vertical Mach 6-7 attack trajectory. As with the Zircon, most Ukrainian weapons can’t stop an Iskander-M.
The war in the Middle East has once again confirmed a simple truth: modern warfare is about mathematics. Ukraine is offering practical solutions – ones that can fundamentally change the math of war.
The few interceptor missiles that Ukraine does operate marginally capable of intercepting a Russian ballistic or hypersonic missile – the US-made PAC-3 and the French/Italian Aster – are critically short in the Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU) inventory.
Even worse for Ukraine, for the last year the White House has dragged its feet on selling Ukraine even small batches of PAC-3 because the regime hopes that limiting US military assistance to Ukraine would force Kyiv to capitulate to Russia and sign a peace deal.
Russian warships in the Black Sea, most likely four or five missile boats or frigates and possibly accompanied by one or two submarines, fired another powerful time-compressed barrage of 25 Kalibr cruise missiles that night. A post-Soviet weapon long in Russian navy service, a Kalibr flies at low level at near-sonic speeds, and carries a warhead weighing about half a ton.
The air component of the Russian attack was launched by a mix of turboprop Tu-95MS and supersonic Tu-160 bombers flying above Russia’s Samara region: 24 Kh-101 cruise missiles, an advanced weapon flying at speeds and altitudes similar to a Kalibr, but capable of dropping flares supposedly to foil an attacker’s IR missile, and equipped with anti-jamming electronics. Parallel with the Kh-101s, a small salvo of four Kh-59 cruise missiles launched from a ground site in Russia’s Kursk region.
The Ukrainian air defense network that took on those Russian missiles, and the 430+ attack drones that accompanied them, was deeply-layered and in some ways unique. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday told British MPs that Ukraine’s air defense commanders and troops networked together and watched the incoming attack unfold in real-time using shared data and smart devices like iPhones, he said.
The Ukrainian data-sharing approach contrasts sharply with conventional air defense networks that centralize control and order engagements with a top-down chain of command. Zelensky did not state how the first warning was received during Russia’s Friday the Thirteenth attack, but on Thursday Ukrainian military information networks reported a first-time-in-the-war sighting of a Sweden-built AWACS-like ASC 890 aircraft probably approaching an airfield in western Ukraine.
Stockholm donated two state-of-the-art Saab ASC890 AEW&C (airborne early warning and command) platforms to Ukraine in 2024 and unconfirmed reports the Ukrainian Air Force had started operating the planes surfaced a year later, freeing Ukraine from total dependence on NATO-provided air watch ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) information, which in 2025 the Trump administration cut Ukraine off from at least twice.
A unique Ukrainian air watch network called Sky Fortress, set up in 2023 by placing thousands of low-cost acoustic sensors (including cheap Android smartphones) on two meter poles inside weather-proof boxes, was probably the main means by which the national air defense network detected – by matching Shahed engine sound to a digital audioprint – and tracked the drones using triangulation and data fusion. First fielded in early 2023 and expanded since then, the Sky Fortress network in 2026 probably sucks up data from 30,000+ sensors.
As Shahed approach flightpaths became clear via the Sky Fortress network, National Guard commanders, plugged into the air defense data-sharing system, dispatched mobile teams – armed with machine guns aboard pickup trucks, or less commonly, armed with hand-held anti-aircraft missiles – to sites in the projected flightpath of incoming Shahed drones.
When possible Ukrainian commanders position teams in chains so that the Russian drone flies through a gauntlet; on Friday Shahed UAVs were detected up to two hours before arrival, giving plenty of time for the gun teams to get in position, and cannon gunners at fixed sites to wait for the moment one of them flew close enough to shoot at.
Mobile tactics for jammers and interceptor drones are similar: a mobile team tries to set up beneath the flightpath of an incoming Shahed and disable it. According to one of Ukraine’s leading interceptor drone manufacturers, a company called Wild Hornets, about half of all Shahed drones launched at Ukraine by Russia are destroyed by an interceptor drone sent into the air by a mobile team in the Shahed flightpath.
On Friday the 13th, most likely, interceptor drones – out of what was only an untested experimental technology in Fall 2025 – took out more than 200 explosives-toting Shaheds sent by Russia at Ukrainian homes and businesses.
Shahed drones making it past the mobile teams reaching an especially protected target – as any Kyiv motorist attempting to use his GPS near a big government building knows – is likely to encounter yet another layer of defense: fixed, heavy-duty jammers powerful enough to sever the link between the Russian drone’s communications and its operator, and sometimes to scramble on-board electronics.
That night air watch networks and even operators reported Shahed engagements a full hour before the drones reached Kyiv’s airspace, sometimes 60 kilometers away. Kyiv Post reporters and others observed more surface-to-air fire, some of it fairly intense, well within the city limits. Ukraine’s air defense command on the night claimed 403 drones of all types taken out, of 430 launched by Russia.
The Ukrainian claimed score against cruise missiles was even better: 53 launched by Russia, and 53 shot down by Ukraine. The Air Force credited its small fleet of F-16 warplanes, and the fighter pilots and ground crew, for making a big contribution. Kyiv Post couldn’t confirm that claim independently. Other cruise missile shoot-downs reportedly were made by made by ground batteries firing Norwegian/US NASAMS missiles or German IRIS-T missiles.
Of the difficult-to-intercept ballistic and hypersonic missiles, the admitted Ukrainian kill count was worse: one of two Zircons knocked down, and seven of thirteen Iskander-M missiles intercepted. Practically all reports suggested American PAC-3 missiles took out the Iskander-Ms, dangerously cutting into Ukraine’s already-tiny stockpile of reloads.
The worst material damage caused by the 8 missiles and 27 Shahed drones that broke through Ukrainian air defenses was to the Trypilska Thermal Power Plant south of the city and the 750 kV electricity substation to the north-east. Locals reported temporary power outages in nearby neighborhoods, but across the capital the power grid stood the attack and lights stayed on.
Hits from missiles and drones missing their target, and also debris falling from successful intercepts, were reported in Kyiv’s Obukhiv, Vyshhorod, Bucha districts with authorities counting at least 30 instances of damaged property. Among sites hit were schools, industrial warehousing, apartment buildings and private homes. Nationwide 184 sites reportedly were damaged.
Ukrainian civil defense and news platforms by midday generally reported air defenses had done a solid job defending the country’s skies, but, that the Russian assault still was bad news because of civilians killed and wounded.
The most lethal “collateral damage” of the Friday attack appears to have struck the Kyiv suburb of Brovary where a missile, very likely an Iskander-M, missed power grid nearby and plowed into a residential building to kill four people. Brovary mayor Ihor Sapozhko identified one victim as Andriy Tyshchenko, 56. He left behind a widow and two children, Sapozhko told local media. One injured person later died in the hospital.
A sixth greater Kyiv resident, in the suburb town of Novi Petrivsi, died after a warhead from an unspecified weapon hit his home and exploded, Kyiv Regional Military Administration head Mykola Kalashnyk said in a statement that Saturday.
The next night Russian forces launched 97 drones of which 70 were Shahed kamikaze drones, and no missiles from the same locations as before. Ukrainian forces shot down 90. The seven that got through hit at five locations, mostly in the south, causing damage but no casualties.
This article was written using open Russian and Ukrainian sources including air warning and strike tracking networks like airguardua and monitor_ua, military officials and statements like the Russian Defense Ministry and the Ukrainian Air Force, local governments statements including regional defense command and regional emergency response agencies, eyewitness accounts and in some cases Kyiv Post reporter observations.
Russian attack tactics observed since September 2022 in more than 20 major missile/drone strikes launched by Russia against Ukraine were used to fill data gaps in a few cases.
