At noon on June 6, the sky of eight western Russia suddenly turned into a huge hunting ground. From Bryansk to the outskirts of Moscow, the Russian air defense firepower network suddenly lit up. Missiles dragged white smoke into the sky, and exploded fireballs bloomed one after another. When the midnight bell rang, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that 82 Ukrainian drones had been shot down in the past 10 and a half hours. This air battle, which set a record of single-day interception, took place on the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landing, and attracted strong attention from the international community.
Compared with the record of shooting down 53 aircraft on a single day in April, the number of Ukrainian drones surged by 50%. The attack range is unprecedented - from Kursk and Belgorod on the border, it goes deeper to Ryazan Prefecture, which is only 180 kilometers away from Moscow. Witnesses in Kaluga described: "The sky is like tin foil lit, and burning debris keep falling." Local firefighters extinguished more than 20 fires caused by drone wreckage overnight.
What is more intriguing is the choice of time. The attack began at 14:30 Moscow time, as many heads of state of Europe and the United States commemorated the World War II landing operation on Normandy Beach. Russian military expert Victor Litovkin said bluntly: "This is a carefully designed political signal." Ukraine tried to use large-scale attacks to hedge the international community's shift of attention to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, and at the same time test the loopholes in Russia's deep air defense system.
The downed drones include a large number of modified commercial models, which cost only a few thousand dollars. The Ukrainian army adopted the "bee swarm tactic" to penetrate in multiple batches and in multiple directions, and some drones flew to the ground to avoid radar. However, the Russian army's recently upgraded "Armor-S1M" ammunition system has shown efficient interception capabilities. Its radar can track 40 targets at the same time and build a dual fire net with missiles and rapid-fire guns. Video from the Russian Ministry of Defense shows that a drone trying to raid the Liangzanzhou oil refinery was accurately hit five kilometers away from the target.
Civil facilities become victims again. The feed warehouse of a dairy farm in Belgorodzhou was ignited by a crashed drone, and hundreds of cows were trampled in panic in the smell of burnt. Residents of Liangzanzhou took photos of the fragments of the wings inserted in their vegetable garden: "I was weeding yesterday, but today I picked up war parts." Although the Russian side said that all drones were intercepting outside residential areas, social media videos showed that air defense missiles accidentally hit the roof of a residential house and blasted through three floors of floors.
This war of attrition exposed the strategic intentions of both sides. The Ukrainian army continued to consume Russian expensive air defense missiles through cheap drones, trying to tear open the defense lines of energy facilities. The Russian army demonstrated its ability to protect deep targets - the Vnukovo Airport in Moscow Prefecture was closed for a while during the attack, but the national flag on the dome of the Kremlin was still flying in the night.
NATO military observers discovered new trends from wreckage analysis: some drones were equipped with simple anti-jamming devices, and the airborne explosives increased to 50 kilograms. This means that a single drone with successful penetration in the future may cause greater damage. The exhausted state of the Russian air defense forces also caused concerns - photos of soldiers sleeping soundly in the ground during the interception gap are circulating on the Internet.
When the wreckage of 82 drones are scattered in the Russian fields, they are not only the remnants of technological confrontation, but also the proof of the cruel arithmetic of modern warfare: shooting down drones of thousands of dollars with missiles worth millions of dollars, and exchanging the peace of civilians for strategic buffer space. There is no winner in this strangle battle in the sky, only the rising smoke of gunpowder and endless bills.
