KYIV, Nov 26 - Russia launched 188 drones against most regions of Ukraine in a nighttime blitz, the Ukrainian air force said Tuesday, describing it as a record number of drones deployed in a single attack.

Most of the drones were intercepted, according to the air force, but apartment buildings and critical infrastructure such as the national power grid were damaged. No casualties were immediately reported in the 17 targeted regions, The Associated Press reported.

The Russian Defense Ministry, meanwhile, issued a rare official acknowledgement of its assets recently being hit on its own soil by U.S.-made ATACMS missiles, after President Joe Biden authorized Ukraine to use the longer-range weapons to strike deeper inside Russia.

Russia has been hammering civilian areas of Ukraine with increasingly heavy drone, missile and glide bomb attacks since the middle of the year.

At the same time, Russia’s army has largely held the battlefield initiative for the past year and has been pushing hard in the eastern Donetsk region where it is making significant tactical advances, according to Western military analysts.

Ukraine faces a difficult winter, with worries about the reliability of the electricity supply amid Russia’s attacks and how much U.S. support it can count on next year after President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January.

The Russian Defense Ministry said five U.S.-made Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, missiles were fired at one of its air defense missile systems in Russia’s Kursk border region on Saturday.

It said three of the missiles were downed by the Pantsyr short-range air defense systems protecting the position but that two other missiles hit it, injuring an unspecified number of servicemen and damaging the system’s radar.

In another attack with ATACMS on Monday, eight of the missiles were launched at the Kursk-Vostochny military air base near Khalino. Seven of them were shot down and one hit the facility, injuring two servicemen and causing minor damage, the ministry said.

“Preparations for retaliatory action are under way,” the ministry said without elaborating.

A U.S. official said Nov. 19 that ATACMS had been fired at targets inside Russia for the first time.

As Russian Shahed drones spread out across Ukraine late Monday, the air raid alert in the Kyiv region overnight lasted more than seven hours. Russia is trying to unnerve civilians and wear down their will to resist in the almost 3-year-old war, military analysts say.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy noted that each Shahed has 85 foreign components and that Russia obtained them by circumventing international sanctions. He said on the Telegram messaging app that “we need more joint effort so that the sanctions work and force Russia to stop this war.” (ap/ez)