The War in the Sky: Kyiv braces for another winter of Russian attacks

A Euronews documentary goes inside Ukraine’s battle to defend its skies, from air-defence crews battling Russia’s drone threats to workers repairing the damage and families preparing for another winter of attacks.

For years, Ukrainians have lived with a war raging not only along the front line, but above their heads. In Kyiv, the battle in the sky has become part of daily life, measured in air-raid alerts, the sound of air defence and the explosions that follow.

At an air-defence position protecting the capital, the work begins before anything appears overhead. Soldiers prepare their weapons and scan for threats that can arrive at radically different speeds and from different directions.

The challenge is no longer simply the number of weapons Russia can put into the air. Its attacks increasingly combine different threats: Shahed-type attack drones arriving in large waves, ballistic missiles that leave defenders little time to react, and new, faster drones that have added another danger.

Routes change. Timing changes. Weapons approach from different directions. The aim is to find gaps and overwhelm the layers of defence protecting the city.

For the soldiers watching the sky, it has become a technological race. Whenever Ukraine finds a cheaper or more effective way of stopping Russian drones, Russia adjusts how its weapons fly, how fast they travel or how they approach their targets.

Copyright for this text belongs to Euronews.