Early on Wednesday, Ukraine initiated a series of drone attacks against Russia, perhaps the country’s biggest significant invasion of Russian territory since the start of their 18-month conflict.
An airport close to Russia’s border with Estonia and Latvia was struck by one of the Ukrainian drones that were aiming at six Russian areas. According to the Russian news agency Tass, which cited emergency personnel, the drone started a massive fire and damaged four Il-76 military transport planes, which are capable of transporting troops and large amounts of cargo.
Despite no injuries being recorded, the nighttime drone raids persisted for more than four hours, according to officials. Although Kiev rarely claims responsibility for assaults inside of Russia, there was no immediate reply from Ukrainian authorities.
During the night, Moscow’s forces launched a “massive, combined attack” on Kyiv with drones and missiles that left two people dead from falling debris, according to Ukrainian officials.
While Ukraine‘s air defences fired down more than 20 drones and missiles, Sergei Popko, the chief of Kyiv’s military administration, hailed Russia’s attack on the Ukrainian capital as the largest since the spring.
The falling debris, according to Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kiev, damaged and started fires in a number of areas.
While also pursuing a counteroffensive against Russian strongholds in eastern and southern Ukraine, Ukraine has recently intensified its attacks inside of Russia.
In the nocturnal drone assaults on Wednesday, the airport in the Russian region of Pskov, which is located around 700 kilometres north of the Ukrainian border, took the worst damage. In order to examine the damage, all airport-bound and -receiving flights were cancelled for the day.
The Oryol region, located about 400 kilometres south of Moscow, Ryazan, Kaluga, and Bryansk, a bordering Ukrainian city, were also targeted by the Ukrainian drones. Some of the drones, according to Russia, were shot down.
According to Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for the Kremlin, the Russian military would surely examine “how this was done in order to take appropriate measures to prevent these situations in the future.”
Russia’s spokeswoman for the foreign ministry, Maria Zakharova, claimed that Ukraine was depending on outside assistance since the drones “simply would not be able to fly such a distance without carefully researched information from Western satellites.”
The base of Russia’s Black Sea fleet at the port city of Sevastopol, which is under annexation, the Russian military said its forces successfully repulsed an attack by a sea drone.
Russia further claimed that it had destroyed four Ukrainian naval vessels transporting Ukrainian troops in the Black Sea at an unnamed location on Wednesday.
The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, and Reuters provided some of the data for this report.
