Russia fights wave of drones as Ukraine claims troops advancing
Russia said its air defenses downed 117 drones and four tactical missiles, one of the largest overnight attacks of the war, as Ukrainian forces claimed to be continuing advances on Russian territory.
The Defense Ministry in Moscow said its forces destroyed unmanned aerial vehicles over almost all regions bordering Ukraine as well as in the Nizhny Novgorod region to the east of the Russian capital. Regional Governor Gleb Nikitin said drones attacked the Kulebaksky district, which is home to a military airbase about 700 kilometers (435 miles) from the Ukrainian border.
The overnight operation was the biggest involving long-range drones and targeted four Russian airbases to undermine its military’s ability to use glide bombs, said a Ukrainian official with knowledge of the situation, who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters. A Russian Su-34 fighter bomber was also shot down in the Kursk region, according to Ukraine’s General Staff.
Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi told President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that his forces were advancing by as much as 2 kilometers in Russia’s Kursk region on Wednesday, according to a post on Zelenskyy’s Telegram channel. Syrskyi said on Tuesday that Ukrainian troops controlled 74 villages and towns in the Kursk region.
The claims couldn’t be independently verified.
The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, which borders northeastern Ukraine and has been subject to raids and drone attacks, announced a state of emergency on Wednesday.
The wave of overnight attacks came as Russia continued to rush reinforcements to the Kursk border region, which neighbors Belgorod, to counter the Ukrainian incursion that’s now in its ninth day. Mikhail Razvozhaev, the Moscow-appointed governor of Sevastopol in occupied Crimea, confirmed that marines from its 810th brigade were redeployed to Kursk.
Zelenskyy’s office late Tuesday posted a video of his meeting in Kyiv with Lithuanian Defense Minister Laurynas Kasciunas, who said Russia had moved some military units from its Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad in response to the Ukrainian intervention in Kursk, without giving further details.
Kasciunas said Lithuania would lobby other Ukrainian allies to lift restrictions barring Kyiv from using long-range weapons to strike targets in Russia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has called in a trusted aide and former personal bodyguard, Alexey Dyumin, to be his eyes and ears in monitoring operations to expel Ukrainian forces from Russia, according to two people familiar with the decision.
With the Ukrainian incursion exposing manpower pressures facing Russia’s military, the Defense Ministry in Moscow posted a fresh video appeal on Wednesday for people to join the war that Putin started and which has now spread onto Russian territory, prompting at least 180,000 residents in the Kursk region to flee their homes.
Western estimates have put Russian military casualties at as high as 500,000 from an invasion that the Kremlin expected to take days and which is now in its third year.
