The Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) brought down one of Ukraine’s valuable F-16 fighters at the weekend that was trying to counter another massive missile barrage. Such strikes have been intensifying in the last month.

The Kremlin used over 1,200 drones and more than 100 missiles against Ukraine in a week. Russia launched a new devastating missile barrage on Ukraine in May just as ceasefire talks stalled. At the same time, Ukraine has intensified its own drone attacks on Russian soil, striking at economic and military targets deep inside Russia territory.

Russia appears to be repeating its strategy of last March, when another massive barrage successfully depleted Ukraine’s supply of air defence ammunition, leaving its skies open for another six months, after which it was finally resupplied by the US. During that time Russia largely destroyed all of Ukraine’s non-nuclear energy generation capacity.

In what appears to be a repeat of that tactic, Ukraine was forced to deploy its valuable F-16 – Kyiv has reportedly received a total of 24 F-16s from European allies – in an effort to shoot down the incoming missiles and drones.

During the past week, Russian forces launched 114 missiles, more than 1,270 drones and nearly 1,100 guided bombs against Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a video post at the weekend. Another large attack occurred on the night of June 29, when Russia deployed 477 strike UAVs and drone simulators along with 60 missiles.

The F-16 fighter pilot died in a crash while repelling a Russian air attack. Zelenskiy praised the pilot, Maksym Ustymenko, and bestowed upon him posthumously the title of Hero of Ukraine, the country's highest decoration. It is unclear what happened, but according to reports, the plane crashed after it was hit by debris from an exploding missile which it had destroyed, having flown into the expanding cloud of shrapnel.

Zelenskiy has been calling on the US for more Patriot missiles as Ukraine’s stock runs low. He met with US President Donald Trump at the recent Nato summit on June 26 at The Hague and requested more air defence ammunition. Trump was non-committal, saying “maybe, we will have to see about that,” and adding that the US also needed to send Patriots to Israel as part of its clash with Iran.

The Russian rocket attack targeted Smila, in the Cherkasy region, hitting residential buildings, injuring eleven people, including two children. The college at the National University of Food Technologies was also destroyed. An industrial facility was hit in Lviv, and in Poltava a fire was started at a commercial building from falling debris. The Poltava-Pivdenna railway station, along with suburban stations, carriages and administrative buildings, was damaged. In Mykolaiv, a fire broke out at an infrastructure site due to a Russian strike, while in Zaporizhzhia a production facility was damaged.

The day before, Russia launched its latest Grom-E1 missile-bomb, a new hybrid of a glide bomb and missile, over the Dnipro, which Ukrainian air defences successfully intercepted. On the same day, Russia struck a 21-story residential building in Odesa, killing one family and wounding 14 people, including children.