Russia has launched 479 drones against Ukraine in the biggest overnight drone bombardment of the three-year war, according to the Ukrainian air force.

The air force said early on Monday that it had downed 460 drones as well as 19 missiles launched overnight.

Russia’s continued to step up its drone and missile attacks on Ukraine, despite declaring, under pressure from United States President Donald Trump, that it is interested in pursuing peace talks. The record launch came just ahead of the start of a prisoner swap agreed at recent talks between the pair.

Of the hundreds of projectiles fired at numerous targets, only 10 reached their destination, Kyiv officials said. One person was reported injured.

Russia’s escalation of aerial attacks has been matched by a renewed battlefield push in the eastern and northeastern parts of the roughly 1,000km (621-mile) front line in occupied parts of Ukraine.

The onslaught follows a secretive Ukrainian drone attack that damaged several Russian bombers parked at airbases deep inside the country in what was an embarrassment for the Kremlin and, according to Kyiv, a palpable hit on its ability to strike across the border with missiles.

Russia’s Ministry of Defence said one target of Kyiv’s strike was the Dubno airbase in Ukraine’s Rivne region, which hosts tactical aviation aircraft.

The mayor of the western city of Rivne, Oleksandr Tretyak, said the overnight drone launch was “the largest attack” on his region since the start of the war.

Prisoner swap

Late on Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy conceded that in some areas targeted by the Russian offensive, “the situation is very difficult”. However, he provided no details.

Ukraine is shorthanded on the front line against its bigger enemy and needs further military support from its Western partners, especially air defences. However, uncertainty about the US policy has led to doubts about how much help Kyiv can count on.

Two recent rounds of direct peace talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Istanbul have yielded no breakthroughs beyond pledges to swap thousands of prisoners, including dead and seriously wounded soldiers.

Since the agreement, believed to concern an exchange of around 1,200 prisoners by each, was struck last week, the pair has accused one another of failing to meet their obligations.

However, the first batch of POWs was repatriated on Monday afternoon.

“Today’s exchange has begun. It will be done in several stages in the coming days,” Zelenskyy said on the Telegram app. “Among those we are bringing back now are the wounded, the severely wounded, and those under the age of 25,” he added.

The Russian defence ministry also said the first exchange had been carried out. It did not say how many prisoners had been swapped, but did note that the numbers on each side matched.

The Russian Defence Ministry said on Monday that its forces shot down 49 Ukrainian drones overnight over seven Russian regions.

Two drones hit a plant specialising in electronic warfare equipment in the Chuvashia region, located more than 600km (373 miles) east of Moscow, officials reported.

Since the beginning of the war in 2022, Russia has targeted both military and civilian areas of Ukraine with Shahed drones. The attacks have killed more than 12,000 Ukrainian civilians, according to the United Nations. However, Russia claims it attacks only military targets.

Alexander Gusev, head of Russia’s Voronezh region, said 25 drones had been shot down there overnight, damaging a gas pipeline and sparking a small fire.

The general staff of the Ukrainian armed forces also claimed that its special operations troops struck two Russian jets stationed at the Savasleyka airfield in Russia’s Novgorod region, located some 650km (404 miles) from the Ukrainian border.

The statement did not say how the planes were struck.

Ukrainian special forces claim to have damaged two fighter jets in a night-time raid on an airfield deep inside Russia as Kyiv seeks to disrupt Vladimir Putin’s steady advances on the frontline.

A week after the spectacle of Operation Spiderweb, when drones struck the Kremlin’s nuclear-capable bombers, the general staff of the Ukrainian army claimed a fresh success.

Special operations forces were said to have launched an assault on the Savasleyka airfield, located in the Nizhny Novgorod region of Russia, about 400 miles from the Ukrainian border.

The army did not provide any details about the nature of the operation and questions remain about the extent of the damage inflicted.

The airfield is used by Russia to deploy MiG-31K fighters carrying Kinzhal ballistic missiles that have been used against Ukrainian armed forces and its cities.

“According to preliminary information, two units of enemy aircraft were hit (probably MiG-31 and Su-30/34 aircraft),” the general staff said in a statement. “The results of the combat operation are being clarified.”

View image in fullscreen The Savasleyka airfield, which Ukraine claims to have hit. Photograph: Google Earth

The covert operation did not upset plans for a prisoner exchange involving younger and injured soldiers.

After a nervous 48 hours for prisoners’ relatives, during which both sides accused the other of backtracking on a deal made during the peace talks in Istanbul, the first stage was completed with those under the age of 25 and severely wounded exchanged.

Should the agreement be implemented in full, with a swap of 1,200 prisoners from each side along with bodies of the dead, it would be the largest of the war.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said in a statement on social media: “This process is very complex and sensitive. Negotiations are ongoing almost every day. We are doing everything we can to bring our people home.”

Video footage also emerged on Monday of a successful Ukrainian drone strike on a factory in Cheboksary, about 800 miles from the Ukrainian border, which makes components crucial to the targeting mechanisms in self-propelled howitzers, Iskander missile systems and Lancet and Shahed kamikaze drones.

Ukraine’s armed forces said the attack on the VNIIR-Progress plant, which is under US sanctions, had led the authorities in Russia to halt commercial flights in the region.

They said: “At present, the destruction of the facility by at least two UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones] and the subsequent large-scale fire have been confirmed. The results of the destruction are being clarified.”

Oleg Nikolayev, the regional governor, said in a statement that production at the factory had been suspended but that the strikes had not caused any casualties.

The operations inside Russia came as the Kremlin stepped up its night-time missile and drone strikes and made progress in pushing back the frontline in the north-east Sumy region and in Donetsk in the east.

On Sunday night and in the early hours of Monday morning, Russia launched 479 drones at Ukraine in the war’s biggest overnight drone bombardment, the Ukrainian air force said.

About 20 missiles were also fired into Ukraine, targeting mainly central and western regions. The operational command of the Polish armed forces said it scrambled fighter jets in response to the aerial attacks in western Ukraine.

The Rivne region, in western Ukraine, sustained the largest attack since the full-scale war began. One person had been confirmed dead, according to the chief of the regional military administration, Oleksandr Koval.

Video footage shared on social media suggested the Dubno airbase may have been struck. It has been claimed that this is the home of Ukraine’s F-16 fighter jets although this could not be independently verified.

Explosions were also heard in Kyiv, where Tymur Tkachenko, the head of the Kyiv city military administration, reported that an office building in the capital’s Darnytsia district had been damaged.

The Ukrainian authorities claimed that their air defences destroyed 277 drones and 19 missiles in mid-flight, with only 10 drones or missiles successfully striking their targets.

In recent weeks, Russian forces have made significant advances in the Sumy region, pushing within 18 miles of the eponymous regional capital, three years after Ukraine’s counteroffensive pushed the Kremlin’s forces out of the area.

The region’s governor, Oleh Hryhorov, said there was no need yet to evacuate Sumy city, describing the situation as “tense but under control of the defence forces”.

Ukraine has denied Moscow’s claims that Russian forces have pushed through the western border of Donetsk into the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region for the first time in the three years of the full-scale war.

Maj Andrii Kovalev, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s general staff, said: “The information is not true. Fighting is ongoing in Donetsk oblast. The enemy did not enter Dnipropetrovsk oblast.”

The Trump administration diverted 20,000 anti-drone missiles originally promised to Kyiv to American forces in the Middle East, president Volodymyr Zelensky has said.

The Ukrainian leader said that the missiles, originally secured in a deal under the Biden administration, were meant to counter Moscow’s Shahed drones, which have played a key role in Russia’s mass bombardment of the country.

“We have big problems with Shaheds,” Zelensky told ABC News’ This Week, in reference to the Iranian-designed drones. “We counted on this project — 20,000 missiles. Anti-Shahed missiles. It was not expensive, but it’s a special technology.”

Zelensky and Trump during a meeting at the Vatican (Ukrainian Presidential Press Office)

The weapons were instead diverted to American forces in the Middle East as the US braces for possible conflict with Iran over a stalled nuclear agreement, The Wall Street Journal reported last week.

US defence secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly issued an “urgent” call to redirect the weapons last Wednesday.

Hegseth’s order coincided with his absence from the most recent Ukraine Defence Contact Group meeting – the first time a defence chief has missed the conference since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

He previously warned European allies that they must provide a greater share of future military assistance to Kyiv. The US halted all new packages of military aid to Ukraine in March this year.

Firefighters work at the site of a building hit by a Russian drone strike in Kharkiv (REUTERS)

Meanwhile, Russia continued its bombardment of Ukraine on Monday, with Kyiv’s air force reporting that almost 500 drones and missiles were launched at them overnight.

With more than 479 drones and 20 missiles launched, it is the biggest overnight attack of the war so far.

Ukraine could be pounded by more than 500 drones per night as the Kremlin is reportedly building new launch sites, according to The Kyiv Independent.

A security source told the Ukrainian publication that Russia’s production rate of Shahed-type Gerans had increased to 70 units per day, up from a reported 21 a day last year, as Moscow plans to add 12-15 new launch sites to their operation.

Zelensky told ABC News’ Martha Raddatz that people didn’t realise “we are under strikes, under attack every day. And you might remember that when they were talking about ceasefires, temporary ceasefire[s], they still continued attacking and launching strikes.”

He added that Russian leader Vladimir Putin was clearly uninterested in peace, reaffirming that only “hard pressure” from global leaders – including the US – would prompt Putin to think pragmatically.

“Then they will stop the war,” He said. “I am convinced that the president of the United States has all the powers and enough leverage to step up.”

In yet another massive overnight attack, Russia launched a total of 499 drones and missiles at Ukraine on Monday.

According to the official statement by Ukraine’s Air Defence forces, 479 of them have been downed.

In a record wave of strikes, Moscow launched 479 Shahed‑type attack drones and various decoy UAVs, four Kh‑47M2 “Kinzhal” air-launched ballistic missiles, 10 Kh‑101 cruise missiles, three Kh‑22 cruise missiles, two Kh‑31P anti‑radar missiles and one Kh‑35 cruise missile.

Ukraine reportedly neutralised 479 of the incoming targets, shooting down 292 and jamming 187 via electronic warfare.

Head of the Communications Department of the Ukrainian Air Force Command Colonel Yurii Ihnat stated the Russian attack overnight mainly targeted one of Ukraine’s operational airfields.

Ukraine’s Air Force issued aerial alerts throughout the overnight on Monday, warning multiple regions of the threat of ballistic missiles and Shahed-type attack drones.

In the evening address on Sunday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also urged Ukrainians to pay attention to air raid warnings in the coming days.

He said Kyiv continues to work on strengthening Ukraine’s air defence. “We urgently need positive signals from the United States regarding air defence systems — we are still waiting for a response to our request to purchase systems that can help.”

Apart from Kyiv, Russia’s latest attacks have specifically targeted western Ukraine. At least one person was reported injured in the city of Rivne in northwestern Ukraine, near the border with Belarus.

The Operational Command of the Polish Armed Forces said it scrambled fighter jets in response to the Russian aerial attacks in western Ukraine.

Poland and allied countries scrambled aircraft early on Monday to ensure the safety of Polish airspace after Russia launched airstrikes targeting western Ukraine near the Polish border, the operational command of the Polish armed forces said. “The steps taken are aimed at ensuring security in the regions bordering the areas at risk,” it said on X.

All of Ukraine was under air raid alerts in the early hours of Monday after the Ukrainian air force warned of Russian missile and drone attacks.

Russia launched an air attack on Kyiv, which Ukraine’s air defence units were trying to repel, the military administration of the Ukrainian capital said on the Telegram messaging app early on Monday.

Russia says its forces are advancing to the edge of the east-central Ukrainian region of Dnipropetrovsk for the first time in the three-year war, raising the prospect of a new front as the conflict escalates and peace talks stall. Russia is attacking the region after reaching the adjacent western frontier of Ukraine’s Donetsk region, according to Russia’s defence ministry. The pro-Ukrainian Deep State map showed forces very close to Dnipropetrovsk, which had a population of more than 3 million before the war, and advancing on the city of Kostyantynivka in Donetsk from several directions.

A Ukrainian military spokesperson, Dmytro Zaporozhets, said that Russian forces were trying to “build a bridgehead for an attack” on Kostyantynivka, an important logistical hub for the Ukrainian army.

Russian military units are also closing in on Sumy city, three years after Ukraine forced them out of the northern region. The troops appear to be within 18 miles (29km) of the city, which is 200 miles north-east of Kyiv.

Independent monitors confirmed Kremlin claims to have retaken the village of Loknia, which had been liberated along with the rest of the Sumy region during Ukraine’s 2022 spring counteroffensive.