13JUL

Overnight barrage shifts no front line

1 min read

10:28UTC

Russia fired 121 drones and twelve missiles at Ukraine overnight on 10 to 11 July, while ISW logged small tactical moves on both sides that shifted no line.

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ConflictDeveloping

Key takeaway

Russia's overnight barrage and small front-line moves changed no line; the fuel war carried the fortnight.

Overnight on 10 to 11 July, Russia fired 6 Iskander-M and S-400 ballistic missiles, 4 cruise missiles, 2 anti-radar missiles and 121 drones at Ukraine, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reported ¹. On the ground, ISW recorded Russian advances in the Kostyantynivka-Druzhkivka area and Ukrainian advances in the Novopavlivka direction on 11 July ².

Neither move was enough to redraw the map, extending the pattern ISW flagged in June of Russia paying heavily for a front that barely shifted . The ground war held its grinding baseline while the fuel war did the moving this fortnight.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Overnight on 10 to 11 July, Russia fired a mix of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, missiles that target radar systems, and 121 drones at Ukraine. At the same time, on the ground, Russian forces pushed forward slightly in one area near Kostyantynivka and Druzhkivka, while Ukrainian forces advanced slightly in another area near Novopavlivka. This matters because it shows the war grinding on in both directions at once: neither the missile campaign nor the ground fighting is producing a decisive shift, just a slow trade of small gains and losses on both sides.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

ISW's own assessment as of late June found neither side holds the reserves to convert local tactical gains into a breakthrough, with Russian losses running at roughly 17 times Ukraine's rate for ground it could not hold.

The simultaneous Russian advance near Kostyantynivka-Druzhkivka and Ukrainian advance near Novopavlivka on the same night reflects that same structural stalemate: both sides can still push forward in narrow sectors, but neither can sustain the follow-through needed to turn a local gain into a wider collapse of the opposing line.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Primary parallel: The overnight 10-11 July barrage's 121 drones and 12 missiles is far smaller in raw volume than the 611-drone, 70-missile barrage of 14-15 June, but it included two anti-radar missiles, weapons built specifically to suppress air-defence radar rather than simply saturate a target area, a composition that points to a more targeted suppression effort rather than a repeat of the mass-drone saturation pattern.

Counter-parallel: Earlier record barrages, such as the 656-drone attack on 2 June, were followed by clear infrastructure or casualty outcomes reported within the same news cycle. This smaller, mixed-precision barrage has not been tied to a comparable single high-casualty event in the material reviewed, making its purpose harder to read as a one-off spectacle rather than a sustained suppression campaign.

Sources:Institute for the Study of War / Critical Threats Project·Institute for the Study of War / Critical Threats Project·Institute for the Study of War / Critical Threats Project

Mentions:Russia →Ukraine →Institute for the Study of War →Iskander →S-400 →Kostiantynivka →Druzhkivka →Novopavlivka →Russian forces →

First Reported In

Update #23 · Moscow rations diesel as US cover lapses

Institute for the Study of War / Critical Threats Project· 13 Jul 2026

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Different Perspectives

Belarus

Minsk announced completion of its own 37th Separate Airborne Assault Brigade near Gomel, under plans dating to August 2025 rather than a response to any single frontline event this window, keeping its hedge of hosting the war without formally joining Russia's mobilisation drive.

European Union / Operation IRINI states

Italy, Greece and Poland boarded the sanctioned tanker Toa Payoh off Pantelleria under a standing EU mandate rather than a national decision, extending enforcement from the Channel and Baltic and the Black Sea and Azov into the Mediterranean. Italian Defence Minister Guido Crosetto praised the crew; the captain's refusal to produce documentation left detention unconfirmed.

Poland and the NATO eastern flank

Warsaw's Coordination Team said explicitly its forces tracked the 30 July missile incursion and were ready to shoot it down, then flew air cover for an EU tanker interdiction three days later. Poland is simultaneously the war's nearest spillover victim and a contributor to enforcing sanctions against the state causing that spillover.

Ukraine (government, defence establishment and civilians)

Kyiv runs its manpower crisis through acting Defence Minister Yevhen Khmara, whose formal appointment waits for parliament's 18 August return, and a fortnight-old Commander-in-Chief, Mykhailo Drapatyi. Reported attacks on enlistment officers rose from 5 cases in 2022 to 341 in 2025, reaching Odesa's Territorial Recruitment Centre staff directly on 2 August.

Kremlin and Russian domestic economic voices

Moscow has not addressed July's advance-rate collapse or Sberbank's OFZ warning; Novak's diary ran to OPEC+ quota diplomacy with no diesel item logged since 15 July. Economist Nikolai Korzhenevsky calls the Central Bank's RUB 2.3tn in bank lending effectively deficit monetisation, a framing Sberbank's Skvortsov, with his own institutional interest, has not disputed.

IAEA (Rafael Grossi)

IAEA inspectors logged Zaporizhzhia's 22nd loss of off-site power, ten of them in the last three months, after a thunderstorm knocked out the plant's sole surviving backup line. Grossi reads the accelerating frequency, not any single outage, as the safety signal now that the plant's redundancy is exhausted.