Russia has kept striking Ukraine’s energy sector throughout the week since US President Donald Trump announced an energy ceasefire, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on 18 October. From overnight into Sunday, Russian drones and a ballistic missile hit substations, homes, and industrial sites from Odesa to Volyn. They killed civilians and left tens of thousands of families without power.

Russia fights along the front line while hitting cities and the grid behind it with drones, missiles, and glide bombs. Ukraine says Moscow plans up to 1,000 such munitions against 60 key infrastructure sites this winter, and jet-powered drones partly free it to concentrate missiles on fewer targets, the Institute for the Study of War assessed. With Graham Act penalties on hold and US sanctions on Russian diesel suspended, Russia faces no new US cost for its strikes on Ukraine’s grid. Protecting and restoring the grid falls to Ukraine’s air defenses and repair crews.

Russia hit energy sites 76 times in a week

Zelenskyy counted 76 deliberate Russian strikes on energy and oil-and-gas facilities since Trump’s announcement. Overnight, Russia hit substations in Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Khmelnytskyi, and Odesa oblasts, he said. In the past week, Russia fired almost 2,700 attack drones, 1,700 aerial bombs, and 66 missiles, most of them ballistic, mainly to cause a blackout. His message was aimed at Washington.

“America must see that Russia is not taking steps in return for the lifting of sanctions or deals. On the contrary, they take every signal that they can make money as proof that their bet on war is working and they can keep fighting,” Zelenskyy wrote.

Overnight, Russia launched one Iskander-M ballistic missile and 180 Shahed-type drones, 26 of them jet-powered, the Air Force reported. Air defenses downed or suppressed 152 drones, but strikes hit 20 locations.

Power cuts from Odesa to Ternopil

Strikes left about 24,000 consumers in Odesa Oblast without power, oblast head Oleh Kiper said. In Vinnytsia Oblast, the attack damaged critical infrastructure and forced emergency outages, oblast head Natalia Zabolotna wrote. Drones hit three energy facilities in Ternopil Oblast, one of them for the second time, and cut power to some consumers, oblast head Taras Pastukh said.

Civilians killed and injured

A Russian strike on Zaporizhzhia killed a 27-year-old woman and injured two others, including a 16-year-old, the State Emergency Service reported. In Poltava, an evening attack killed one person, injured four, and damaged 10 detached houses, city council secretary Kateryna Yamshchykova said.

A drone hit a high-rise in Odesa and set its roof on fire. A 13-year-old girl was hurt, city military administration head Serhii Lysak said, and Kiper put the number of injured at two.

In Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Russian drones and artillery injured three people, oblast head Oleksandr Hanzha said. In Donetsk Oblast, Russian attacks killed seven civilians on Saturday, six of them in Sloviansk, oblast head Vadym Filashkin reported.

Fires in the west, alerts across the border

A morning drone strike set warehouse and production buildings ablaze at an enterprise in Manevychi, Volyn Oblast, oblast head Roman Romaniuk said. With heavy smoke blowing toward the town, Romaniuk urged residents to stay indoors, shut windows and doors, and switch off ventilation. A repeat strike set an enterprise in the district on fire again, the State Emergency Service said, adding that air tests found no dangerous concentrations outside the site. In Lviv Oblast, drone debris damaged a logistics warehouse and two houses, oblast head Maksym Kozytskyi said.

Polish military aircraft operated in Poland’s airspace twice during the attack, as the Government Security Centre warned residents of Lublin Voivodeship and later alerted Subcarpathian Voivodeship. In Lithuania, NATO jets failed to identify an object that apparently entered from Poland, Defense Minister Robertas Kaunas said.

A ceasefire Moscow never confirmed

Trump announced the energy ceasefire on 11 October, news that surprised Zelenskyy. A White House official said Russia was still weighing it. Hours later, Russia hit a Kharkiv power plant, and on 14 October it fired 39 ballistic missiles at the grid. Then Trump waived Graham Act penalties on buyers of Russian oil, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the administration wants 60 days to weigh the economic effects.

On or just before Wednesday, 14 October, Russian Geran-4 one-way attack drones struck two more cargo ships—one in the Buh River Estuary near Mykolaiv and another in Chornomorsk, 20 km south of Odesa.

They're the latest strikes in competing Russian and Ukrainian countershipping campaigns that have, since this summer, throttled Black Sea grain exports.

The jet-propelled Geran-4s are Russia's weapons of choice for these ship strikes. The drones haul warheads of up to 90 kg at up to 500 km/h and can fly more than 700 km. They already had AI-assisted targeting, and the Russians recently added terrain-matching navigation to make them less reliant on satellites and harder to jam with signal-scrambling electronic warfare.

For months, the Geran-4s and other Russian munitions have pummeled Ukrainian ports and the ships hauling grain from them. But Ukrainian forces were actually the first to escalate the shipping fight in an effort to squeeze Russian logistics.

Russian Geran-4 jet-drones struck two more cargo ships, in the Buh River Estuary and at Chornomorsk Port in Odesa Oblast. pic.twitter.com/wOXcJFAj5O

— AMK Mapping (@AMK_Mapping_) October 14, 2026

As recently as early this summer, hundreds of Russian tankers and dry cargo ships plied the Black Sea and adjacent Sea of Azov, hauling fuel and bulk supplies between ports in Russia and Russian-occupied ports in southern Ukraine.

Most of the Russian vessels were unregistered and sailed without transponders, making them a kind of regional adjunct of Moscow’s “shadow fleet” that ships Russian oil and other goods to the global market in defiance of international sanctions.

Ukrainian drones had already hit ships hauling stolen Ukrainian grain out of occupied ports in June.

On 6 July, Ukraine’s deep strike drone force finally started hunting the rest of the Russian ships. By day eight of the countershipping effort, the Ukrainians had hit 105 vessels. By day 12, drones including AI-assisted Fire Point FP-1/2s had struck 159, even a few tugboats sent to assist the damaged tankers.

Just a few days after Ukraine launched its countershipping campaign, Russia launched a retaliatory campaign targeting Ukraine’s Black Sea grain ports as well as the ships, many of them foreign-flagged, that haul grain through Türkiye’s Bosporus Strait out to the Mediterranean Sea and onward to foreign ports.

Soon, the Russian shadow fleet’s hundreds of ships were either drifting, disabled, or sheltering in Russian ports. On the other side of the Black Sea, Ukraine’s lucrative grain trade was in a state of collapse. Ports were under constant attack. International shippers were increasingly reluctant to send their vessels into the Black Sea.

Trade freefall

Grain shipment figures on both sides tell a stark tale. According to the Russian Grain Union, in September approximately 1.36 million tons of wheat shipped from Russian ports, including ports on the Black Sea and Sea of Azov, compared to 5.4 million tons in September 2025—a 75% reduction.

Meanwhile, Ukraine exported 1.094 million tons of wheat in September, down from 2.051 million tons in September 2025—a 47% reduction. The only thing preventing further throttling of Ukrainian grain exports was Izmail, Renia, and Kilia—the country’s three small ports on the Danube River, which forms Ukraine’s southern border with Romania and flows into the western Black Sea a relatively short 435 km from the Bosporus Strait.

But the Russians were beginning to target the Danube ports and the grain ships heading to and from them, too. In October, Russian drones sank the Saint Kitts-flagged M/V Royad Mammadov, bound from Izmail to Ravenna, Italy, with Ukrainian grain, and the Togo-flagged M/V Alfa Watan, and damaged the Palau-flagged M/V Able, killing at least two seafarers.

“The Black Sea grain standoff, in which both Russia and Ukraine continue to suffer losses, persists,” Polish open-source intelligence analyst Thorkill wrote.

With global food prices rising partially as a result of the bottleneck in grain exports through the Bosporus, the United Nations and Türkiye have been trying to arrange talks between Russia and Ukraine regarding a possible Black Sea ceasefire.

A previous grain deal, brokered by Türkiye and the UN in 2022, collapsed a year later. Ukraine kept ships moving through its own corridor until Russian strikes shut it down this summer.

Update, 16 October: Drones hit at least four more merchant ships off Bulgaria and Romania between 13 and 15 October, sinking the HS Dignity off Krapets. At least 17 seafarers are missing. Romanian President Nicușor Dan called the attacks “attempts by Russia” to destabilize Romania and Bulgaria and said NATO’s North Atlantic Council would discuss them.