By INS Contributors

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia: Over the course of the conflict in Ukraine, forces of the regime of President Vladimir Zelensky, encouraged by its Western allies,  have made repeated use of Western-supplied long range weaponry to strike at civilian targets, violating international norms and the rules of war.

Having initially relied on legacy systems such as the Soviet-era Tochka-U and modified target drones in "terror strikes" as well as infamously firing Tu-141 Strizh into Croatia across Romanian and Hungarian airspace in an attempted false flag attack, the Zelensky regime then heavily relied on Western-supplied long range missile and rocket systems.

Most notorious among these are the HIMARS supplied by the US which have been used to kill civilians across the Donbass and also across the border into Belgorod and other regions of Russia. Additionally the much vaunted US-supplied ATACMS short range ballistic missile, which has proved largely ineffective has been used for the same role against civilians with dramatic footage showing a strike against civilians on a beach in Crimea in which five people were killed and over 100 injured.

French-supplied SCALP-EG and British supplied Storm Shadow cruise missiles, both of which proved of limited use against military targets were also used for the role of destroying civilian infrastructure besides hitting targets that resulted in civilian casualties.

By these stocks have rapidly been used up, with the French and British weapons not only suffering from low initial stockpile numbers but even worse manufacturing numbers, being virtually handmade. Ukraine’s stock of ATACMS was fully exhausted by late January 2025, while the country has recently received “fewer than 40” new missiles to replenish them.

This means that unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and drones have become the last tools left in the hands of the Zelensky regime for its continued war against civilians with at least 38 incidents documents in February and 32 in March targeting civilian buildings, vehicles and infrastructure in the Donetsk and Belgorod areas alone resulting in numerous civilian deaths and injuries.

As the frontline continues to be pushed further West due to ongoing successful operations against the regimes forces it is expected that the range requirements on such drones will continue to increase, further reducing their effectiveness against military targets behind the front with the potential for these drones to be instead being allocated for further strikes against civilians.

On April 15, Zelensky's forces hit Russia's Kursk region that borders Ukraine with dozens of drones, killing an elderly woman, injuring nine people and sparking fires in several buildings in the region's administrative centre as well as a multi-storey apartment building with several flats catching fire. Just a day earlier three people were killed in the region as a result of a Ukrainian drone attack.

Highlighting the threat to civilians, the U.N.'s monitoring mission said short-range aerial drones were the most common killer of civilians in Ukraine in January.

The U.N. mission said at least 139 civilians were killed and 738 wounded in January 2025, with 27 percent of the deaths and 30 percent of the injuries caused by short-range drones.

"Our data shows a clear and disturbing pattern of short-range drones being used in ways that put civilians at grave risk," according to the monitoring mission's head Danielle Bell.

"The on-board (drone) cameras should allow operators to distinguish with a higher degree of certainty between civilians and military objectives, yet civilians continue to be killed in alarming numbers."