Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 14 October 2025

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade

Update on Current Situation in Ukraine: H.E. Larysa Gerasko, Ambassador of Ukraine to Ireland

2:00 am

H.E. Ms Larysa Gerasko:

It depends. By using these components, Russia has developed its drones more and more. It changes drones and their capacity all the time. We have so many innovations as well. We are developing our drones but the Russians are not sleeping either. Mostly, they are used during the night in order to attack civilian infrastructure and residential buildings because people are sleeping. Unfortunately, more than three years after the full-scale invasion, civilians are quite tired, to be honest, and they do not want to go to the bomb shelter every time and they do not react on each and every air raid. I did the same when I was in Ukraine this summer. I did not go to the bomb shelter because I was tired and wanted to sleep. When I was in my home town with my parents in the evening, at 7 p.m. maybe, two Russian drones were flying over our house. We were sitting outside in the garden. My parents live in the countryside and there are no bomb shelters, so where could we run? Where could we hide? Nowhere. I am not a military person but they use different kinds of weapons. For instance, some might just target cars or houses. There are different kinds of drones, like Shahed, which is a huge one -----