Russians down Ukrainian drones in Crimea as war broadens

world
Russians Down Ukrainian Drones In Crimea As War Broadens
Russia Ukraine War, © AP/Press Association Images
Share this article

By Paul Byrne and Joanna Kozlowska, Associated Press

Russian authorities claimed they shot down Ukrainian drones on Saturday in Crimea, while Ukrainian officials said Russian forces continued to attempt to seize one of the few cities in eastern Ukraine not already under their control.

The Russian military also kept up its strikes in Ukraine’s north and south.

Advertisement

In Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, Russian authorities said local air defences shot down a drone above the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol.

It was the second drone incident at the headquarters in three weeks and followed explosions at a Russian airfield and ammunition depot on the peninsula this month.


Russia Ukraine War
A worker cleans up inside as Tikhon Pavlov, 11, walks past the Kramatorsk College of Technologies and Design, where he used to take karate lessons, after an early morning rocket attack in Kramatorsk, Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Advertisement

Oleg Kryuchkov, an aide to Crimea’s governor, also said on Saturday that “attacks by small drones” triggered air-defence systems in western Crimea.

“Air defence systems successfully hit all targets over the territory over Crimea on Saturday morning. There are no casualties or material damage,” his boss, Sergei Aksyonov, said on Telegram.

Sevastopol governor Mikhail Razvozhaev said on Telegram that the city’s air-defence systems were called into action again late on Saturday.

The incidents underlined Russian forces’ vulnerability in Crimea. A drone attack on Russia’s Black Sea naval headquarters on July 31 injured five people and forced the cancellation of observances of Russia’s Navy Day.

Advertisement


 

This week, a Russian ammunition depot in Crimea was hit by an explosion. Last week, nine Russian warplanes were reported destroyed at an airbase on Crimea.

Advertisement

Ukrainian authorities have stopped short of publicly claiming responsibility. But president Volodymyr Zelensky alluded to Ukrainian attacks behind enemy lines after the blasts in Crimea.

Meanwhile, fighting in southern Ukrainian areas just north of Crimea has stepped up in recent weeks as Ukrainian forces try to drive Russian forces out of cities they have occupied since early in the six-month-old war.

A Russian missile attack wounded 12 people, including three children, and damaged houses and an apartment block on Saturday in the town of Voznesensk in the Mykolaiv region, the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office said.

Two of the children were in serious condition and the governor said one had lost an eye.

Advertisement


Russia Ukraine War
Anatolii Slobodianik pulls books from the rubble of the Kramatorsk College of Technologies and Design (AP Photo/David Goldman)

A Ukrainian airstrike, meanwhile, hit targets in Melitopol, the largest Russian-controlled city in the Zaporizhzhia region 65 miles north of Crimea, according to Ukrainian and Russia-installed local officials.

The Ukrainian military on Saturday said it had destroyed a prized Russian radar system and other equipment stationed in occupied areas in the southern Zaporizhzhia region. It was not clear if this was the strike on Melitopol.

“Tonight, there were powerful explosions in Melitopol, which the whole city heard,” the Ukrainian mayor of Melitopol, Ivan Ferodov, said. “According to preliminary data, (it was) a precise hit on one of the Russian military bases, which the Russian fascists are trying to restore for the umpteenth time in the airfield area.”

In the east, Ukraine’s military General Staff said on Saturday that intensified combat took place around Bakhmut, a small city whose capture would enable Russia to threaten the two largest remaining Ukrainian-held cities in the eastern Donbas region.


 

Bakhmut for weeks has been a key target of Moscow’s eastern offensive as the Russian military tries to complete a months-long campaign to conquer all of the Donbas, where pro-Moscow separatists have proclaimed two republics that Russia recognised as sovereign states at the beginning of the war.

A local Ukrainian official reported sustained fighting on Saturday near four settlements on the border of Luhansk and Donetsk provinces, which together make up the contested Donbas region.

Luhansk governor Serhii Haidai did not name the settlements. Russian forces overran nearly all of Luhansk last month and since then have focused on capturing Ukrainian-held areas of Donetsk.

Russian shelling killed seven civilians on Friday in Donetsk province, including four in Bakhmut, governor Pavlo Kyrylenko wrote on Saturday on Telegram.

Taking Bakhmut would give the Russians room to advance on the province’s main Ukrainian-held cities, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.

Ukraine said Sloviansk and Kramatorsk were targeted on Friday, along with the Kharkiv region to the north, home to Ukraine’s second-largest city.

Local authorities reported renewed Russian shelling overnight along a broad front, including the northern Kharkiv and Sumy regions, which border Russia, as well as of the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region and Mykolaiv.

Read More

Message submitting... Thank you for waiting.

Want us to email you top stories each lunch time?

Download our Apps
© BreakingNews.ie 2024, developed by Square1 and powered by PublisherPlus.com