The numbers come in every day. At least ten dead on July 26. Six in areas under Russian control, four in areas under Ukrainian control. The dead include a nine-year-old girl and a child whose age was not released. The drone war grinds on and produces these figures like a factory.
On the Ukrainian side, the worst strike hit a supermarket in Chernihiv, a city in northern Ukraine about 145 kilometers (90 miles) from the border with Belarus. Russian drones struck the store in the middle of the day while families shopped. Two people died, including a child. Thirteen were wounded. President Zelensky called it a “deeply cynical strike on an ordinary supermarket.”
In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, a Russian drone hit residential buildings. One person died, nine were wounded, two of them children. In Zaporizhzhia, guided bombs killed one.
On the Russian side, Ukrainian drone attacks hit Horlivka, a city in the Russian-occupied part of the Donetsk region. Four died. In the occupied part of the Kherson region, one died. A Ukrainian drone killed one person in the village of Smorodino in Russia’s Belgorod region. Three were wounded in Rylsk, Kursk region.
Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed it intercepted 133 drones overnight, including over Moscow and annexed Crimea. Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched 136 drones and 8 missiles; it claimed to have shot down 104 of the drones and 6 of the missiles. Both sides inflate the other’s losses and minimize their own. But the bodies on the ground are not propaganda: they are counted by local authorities, not by the defense ministries.
The war in Ukraine has been fought largely with drones for more than three years. Neither side has air superiority. Both sides launch hundreds of one-way attack drones every week. The weapons are cheap, imprecise, and devastating when they hit a supermarket at noon.
The ten dead on July 26 are a slow day by the standards of this war. The war has killed tens of thousands of civilians since 2022. But slow days do not mean less grief. They mean the grief is distributed in smaller batches, one supermarket or one apartment building at a time.