Russia Launches Spring Offensive With 948 Drones in 24 Hours, Striking 11 Ukrainian Regions

The most symbolically significant strike hit Lviv, where a drone struck a building adjacent to the 17th-century St. Andrew's Church in the city's UNESCO World Heritage historic center. Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko posted on X: "Russia is attacking a crowded city centre in broad daylight." Lviv, in western Ukraine far from the front lines, has been a refuge for internally displaced Ukrainians and a hub for Western journalists and aid workers throughout the war; strikes there carry a different political weight than attacks on the Donbas.

“Andrew's Church in the city's UNESCO World Heritage historic center.”

The energy infrastructure targeting was systematic. Russian strikes hit facilities in Yuzhny, Odessa region, causing blackouts across six Ukrainian regions. The cascading effect reached beyond Ukraine's borders: Moldova's government proposed a 60-day state of energy emergency to parliament after the strikes disrupted electricity supplies that Chisinau depends on from Ukrainian grid connections. The energy targeting strategy — which Russia has pursued repeatedly since 2022 — is designed to exhaust Ukraine's air defense ammunition and repair capacity simultaneously.

The Institute for the Study of War, in its March 24 assessment, cited Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief General Oleksandr Syrskyi's report of 619 Russian attacks in the preceding four days as confirmation that the spring offensive is underway. ISW noted simultaneous attempts to breach Ukrainian defensive lines in multiple strategic areas — the Kupyansk direction in Kharkiv region, the Donetsk front near Avdiivka, and the Zaporizhia axis. Russia captured the village of Peschanoe in Kharkiv region on March 24. ISW's analysts noted this is a different operational tempo from Russia's winter advances, which were slower and more attrition-focused; the spring push appears aimed at achieving territorial gains before Western-supplied ammunition stocks can be fully replenished.

Russian military losses in the 24 hours of March 24 were reported by Ukraine's Ministry of Defense at 890 troops killed or wounded, bringing total Russian combat losses since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022 to approximately 1,289,740. NATO's own assessments — typically more conservative — put the figure at roughly 450,000 killed or seriously wounded, acknowledging significant uncertainty in both directions.

Poland activated ground-based air defense systems and scrambled combat aircraft on the night of March 23-24 in response to drone activity near its border with Ukraine. Polish Air Force spokesperson Colonel Maciej Hypki told reporters this was "a standard precautionary response" and that no drones had crossed into Polish territory. Poland has activated similar precautionary measures on at least six prior occasions since Russia's full-scale invasion began.

The counterintuitive element in the spring offensive's timing is its relationship to the Iran war. Several military analysts have noted that the Iran conflict has divided Western diplomatic and political attention at exactly the moment Russia chose to escalate. U.S. intelligence bandwidth, Congressional debate, and media coverage have all shifted significantly toward the Middle East since the Iran war began — creating, in the view of the Royal United Services Institute, "a permissive environment" for Russia to press its military advantage in Ukraine without the same level of Western scrutiny.

For European consumers and businesses, the energy infrastructure attacks have immediate implications. Natural gas prices in Europe edged higher on March 24 as markets priced in renewed disruption risk to Ukrainian transit routes and grid interconnections. Any sustained disruption to Ukrainian energy infrastructure also increases the probability that European governments will need to implement demand reduction measures similar to those deployed in the winter of 2022-2023. For investors with exposure to European utilities or energy infrastructure, the spring offensive signals that the risk premium built into European energy prices since 2022 is not going away. For policymakers, the ISW assessment that Russia is attempting to breach multiple defensive lines simultaneously creates immediate pressure on NATO allies to accelerate ammunition deliveries — a debate that is about to become more urgent in Brussels.

The next 30 days will define the trajectory of the spring offensive. If Russia achieves meaningful territorial gains — even a few kilometers on multiple axes simultaneously — it will have demonstrated that Ukraine's defensive capacity has atrophied relative to the previous two years. If Ukraine holds, the attritional logic that has characterized most of the war since 2023 reasserts itself, and the spring push becomes another expensive Russian failure.