In one of the most punishing nights of Ukraine's deep-strike campaign, Ukrainian long-range drones hit the Rostov-on-Don Tsentralny military airfield overnight into September 17 — and, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky, destroyed one Antonov An-12, two An-26 transport aircraft and three helicopters on the ground. In the same operation, Ukrainian forces knocked out Russian S-400 air defence launchers in the Bryansk region and struck the Slavneft-YANOS oil refinery in Yaroslavl, hundreds of kilometres apart.
SIX AIRCRAFT GONE AT ROSTOV
Zelensky confirmed the Rostov results publicly, crediting the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) with what he called precise work against the airfield, alongside a joint SBU–GUR–SZR operation against the Yaroslavl refinery. "There are good results in the Black Sea too," he added. "Russia must choose peace."
The strike is only partially corroborated by independent evidence — the aircraft counts come from Ukrainian official claims and have not been fully verified. But what happened next lends them weight. Rostov Oblast Governor Yury Slyusar confirmed a fire at the site, saying falling drone debris damaged a transformer substation and cut power to four districts of Rostov-on-Don. NASA's FIRMS satellite fire-detection service recorded a fire at the airfield's aircraft parking apron, and the Russian monitoring channel Astra identified the blaze on the grounds of the Tsentralny military airfield. The respected open-source analysts at CyberBoroshno, reviewing satellite imagery, concluded four aircraft were confirmed destroyed: two Mi-8 helicopters, one An-12 and one An-26.
The losses are painful precisely because they are irreplaceable. The An-12 and An-26 are Soviet-era Antonov transports whose production ended decades ago at plants that now stand in Ukraine. Russia cannot simply order replacements — every airframe destroyed is gone for good. As a southern logistics hub feeding Russia's war in occupied Ukraine, Rostov Tsentralny has now caught fire at least eight times in 2026, including strikes on September 6 that Ukraine says destroyed a Podlet radar station and two Pantsir-S1 systems.
HUNTING THE S-400
The same night, Ukraine's Defence Forces destroyed a Russian S-400 launcher near the village of Poroshino in Bryansk Oblast, using FP-1 strike drones built by the Ukrainian company Fire Point. Fire Point said the launcher had been modified by Russian forces to fire on ground targets — including Kyiv — and that the strike hit it along highway 15K-303. CyberBoroshno geolocated the wreckage to coordinates 53.134224, 33.944510.
Ukraine's General Staff separately reported striking two S-400 launchers overnight into September 17 in the Vygonychi area of Bryansk Oblast — close to Poroshino, though it is unclear whether that report describes the same launcher Fire Point identified or a separate one. Russia has not confirmed any S-400 losses; Bryansk officials said air defences shot down 82 drones over the region in 24 hours but made no mention of losses among their own air defences.
FP-1 drones guiding themselves to the target on the final approach — machine vision that needs no operator link and resists electronic warfare — mark a step change in Ukraine's ability to reach air defences far behind the front. It is the same campaign logic behind the September Neptune missile strikes on the Taganrog aerospace components factory, where satellite imagery confirmed heavy damage to production buildings, and earlier Neptune hits on Russian ships in Novorossiysk.
A CAMPAIGN, NOT A RAID
What makes September 17 remarkable is not any single strike but the schedule: refineries one night, an airfield and S-400 batteries the next, targets hundreds of kilometres apart, carried out by different organisations and drone types. Russia has concentrated its air defence around Moscow and the leadership's residences; the arithmetic of covering everything else simply does not work.
Ukraine has stopped treating deep strike as a special event. For Moscow, the cost is now measured in hardware that cannot be replaced and in air defences that, one launcher at a time, are being methodically stripped away.
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