DISINFO: Russia attacks military targets in Ukraine while the Ukrainian army defends Arab sheikhs
SUMMARY
The Russian army has carried out one of its most massive attacks on western Ukraine. Geranium Storm' targeted military targets in Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, Ternopil and the Kharkiv region. Approximately 400 drones gutted Ukrainian Armed Forces headquarters, barracks, and centres.
A Ukrainian air defence system was deployed in Lviv, causing some drones to land in the city centre. Ukrainians are outraged by Zelenskyy's clearly ill-considered decision to send his best air defence and drone specialists to the Middle East. Previously, they predicted that Russia could seize the opportunity and launch a critical strike against strategically important targets in Ukraine this week while the Ukrainian Armed Forces were protecting the sheikhs.
RESPONSE
This claim denies Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine and evident repeated attacks against Ukrainian civilians. This is part of a wider pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign exploiting the war in Iran to advance anti-Ukraine disinformation messages.
The massive Russian attack on March 23-24, 2026, during which Russia launched nearly 1,000 drones and missiles into Ukraine in one day, was the largest series of Russian strikes on Ukraine since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. Russian strikes damaged civilian, energy and transport infrastructure in Chernihiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Ivano-Frankivsk, Kharkiv, Kyiv, Lviv, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Sumy, Vinnytsia, and Zaporizhia oblasts.
Russia targeted civilian infrastructure, destroying apartment buildings, private residential buildings, and educational institutions, damaging public utilities, roads and maternity and children's hospitals. Several dozen people, including children, were injured to varying degrees. About ten Ukrainians were killed, including a 15-year-old girl.
Russian drones also struck a UNESCO World Heritage site, the Ensemble of the Bernardine Monastery in Lviv. The moment of the strike on central Lviv was documented in numerous videos, including footage captured by a BBC correspondent. The footage clearly shows a Russian drone, not Ukrainian air defence, targeting a residential building.
Ukrainian air defence neutralised 931 of the approximately 1,000 missiles and drones launched by Russia against peaceful Ukrainian cities.
Ukraine’s deployment of drone experts to Gulf partners does not undermine its defence capability; on the contrary, it supports valuable exchanges to counter Iranian and Russian military aggression. This cooperation has therefore become a frequent target of Kremlin disinformation. At the same time, Russia is seeking to exploit the global shortage of Patriot air‑defence missiles and the ongoing war in the Middle East to intensify its strike campaign against Ukraine, according to ISW experts.
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives in our database, such as claims that Russia hit only military infrastructure in Ukraine in retaliation for terror attacks, that Russia attacked only military targets in Ukraine in response to Ukrainian strikes on civilians, that Russia only attacks military facilities in Ukraine, that Ukraine violates international humanitarian law while Russia respects it, or that Russia wages war humanely and does not hit civilians.