Ukraine hits military targets and pipeline in Russia
AFP:
Ukraine said Saturday it hit military targets and a gas pipeline in drone attacks in Russia, where local authorities said three people were killed and two others wounded.
Ukraine’s SBU security service said the strikes, carried out Friday night by long-distance drones, hit a military airfield in the southwestern town of Primorsko-Akhtarsk.
They caused a fire in an areas where Iranian-built Shahed drones — relied on by Russia to attack Ukraine — were stored, the SBU said.
It said the strikes also hit a company, Elektropribor, in Russia’s southern Penza region, which it said “works for the Russian military-industrial complex”, making military digital networks, aviation devices, armoured vehicles and ships.
The governor for the Penza region, Oleg Melnichenko, said on Telegram that one woman had been killed and two other people were wounded in that attack.
Russia’s defence ministry said its air-defence systems had destroyed 112 Ukrainian drones over Russian territory — 34 over the Rostov region — in a nearly nine-hour period, from Friday night to Saturday morning.
An elderly man was killed inside a house that caught fire due to falling drone debris in the Samara region, governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev posted on Telegram.
In the Rostov region, a guard at an industrial facility was killed after a drone attack and a fire in one of the site’s buildings, acting Rostov governor Yuri Sliusar said.
“The military repelled a massive air attack during the night,” destroying drones over seven districts, Sliusar posted on Telegram.
– Heavy use of drones –
Ukraine has regularly used drones to hit targets inside Russia as it fights back against Moscow’s full-scale invasion, launched in February 2022.
Russia, too, has increasingly deployed the unmanned aerial devices as part of its offensive.
An AFP analysis published on Friday showed that Russia’s forces in July launched an unprecedented number of drones, 6,297 of them.
The figure included decoy drones sent into Ukraine’s skies in efforts to saturate the country’s air-defence systems.
In Ukraine’s central-eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, Russian drone attacks Friday night wounded three people, governor Sergiy Lysak wrote on Telegram.
Several buildings, homes and cars were damaged, he said.
Russian forces have claimed advances in Dnipropetrovsk, recently announcing the capture of two villages there, part of Moscow’s accelerated capture of territory in July, according to AFP’s analysis of data from the US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
Kyiv denies any Russian presence in the Dnipropetrovsk area.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has consistently rejected calls for a ceasefire in the more than three-year conflict, said Friday that he wanted peace but that his demands for ending Moscow’s military offensive were “unchanged”.
Those demands include that Ukraine abandon territory and end ambitions to join NATO.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, meanwhile, said only Putin could end the war and renewed his call for a meeting between the two leaders.
“The United States has proposed this. Ukraine has supported it. What is needed is Russia’s readiness,” he wrote on X.