Officials said Thursday that Russia shot down 11 Ukrainian drones in Crimea and two on their way to Moscow, the latest in a flurry of air strikes on Russian-held territory.
“Two UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) flying in the direction of the city of Moscow were destroyed”, Russia’s defence ministry stated in a Telegram message.
According to the report, one drone was shot down over the Kaluga region southwest of Moscow, and another was shot down over the capital’s Odintsovsky neighborhood.
Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin claimed on Telegram that the drones were shot down at approximately 4:00 a.m. (0100 GMT).
The defence ministry reported that two additional Ukrainian drones were shot down close to Sevastopol on the Crimean shore and that another 9 were suppressed by means of electronic warfare and crashed in the Black Sea.
It stated that no damage or casualties had been reported in any of the affected locations.
The strikes came a day after Russia reported two Ukrainian military drones on their way to Moscow were shot down, and they are at least the fourth near-capital attack in a week.
Russia earlier stated that it shot down a drone above Kaluga on Monday, as well as seven drones in the area last Thursday.
Until a recent spate of strikes, Moscow had not been targeted during the Ukraine crisis, which began more than a year ago.
The annexed Crimean peninsula, on the other hand, has been disrupted by many strikes during the conflict, with more regular attacks in recent weeks.
Russia announced Saturday that it had shot down a drone over the Black Sea near Sevastopol, the base of its Black Sea force.
In recent weeks, naval drones have targeted Russian boats in the Black Sea many times, including an attack on an oil tanker on Saturday.
In July, Ukrainian drone strikes on Crimea destroyed an armaments storage and damaged the bridge that connects the peninsula to Russia’s mainland.
Last month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that war was on its way to Russia, with the country’s symbolic centres and military bases becoming targets.
Air assaults have increased since Kyiv launched a counteroffensive in June, despite Ukrainian forces making only minor gains on the ground in the face of heavy resistance from Moscow’s troops.
According to Russian sources, one person was killed and four others were injured by Ukrainian firing on the border town of Gorkovsky in the southern Belgorod region on Wednesday.
On the other side of the front lines, an oil reserve in Ukraine’s Rivne region was destroyed by a massive drone attack on Thursday, according to governor Vitaliy Koval, who also stated rescue personnel and investigators were on the scene.
On Wednesday, a strike in Ukraine’s southern city of Zaporizhzhia killed two people, while shelling in the Donetsk region killed a lady and a small girl.
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