Russia reported new Ukrainian drone attacks on Friday evening, a day after explosions erupted near military bases in Russian-held areas of Ukraine and Russia itself, apparent manifestations of the growing capacity of Kyiv to crush Moscow’s assets away from the front lines.
The latest attacks followed the huge explosions of the past week at an air base in Crimea annexed to Russia. In a new assessment, a Western official said those explosions rendered half of Russia’s Black Sea naval aviation force useless in a stroke.
Russian news agencies RIA and Tass, citing a local official in Crimea, said it appeared Russian anti-aircraft forces were in action near the western Crimean port of Eupatoriya on Friday evening. Video posted by a Russian website showed what appeared to be a surface-to-air missile hitting a target. Reuters was unable to immediately confirm the veracity of the video.
Tass quoted a local official as saying that Russian anti-aircraft forces knocked down six Ukrainian drones sent to attack the town of Nova Kakhovka, east of the city of Kherson. Ukraine says the recapture of Kherson is one of its top priorities.
Further south, an official in Crimea said defenses shot down an unknown number of drones over Sevastopol, Crimea’s largest city.
“Ukrainian Armed Forces gave Russians a magical evening,” said Sergiy Khlan, a member of the Kherson regional council dissolved by the Russian occupation forces.
The previous night, several explosions were reported in Crimea — which Moscow seized and annexed in 2014 – including near Sevastopol, where the Russian Black Sea Fleet has its headquarters, as well as in Kerch, near a huge bridge to Russia.
In Russia, two villages were evacuated after explosions at an ammunition depot in Belgorod province, more than 100 kilometers from territory controlled by Ukrainian forces.
At least five people have been killed and 10 others injured by the Russian bombardment of towns and villages in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, according to regional authorities. The Russian shelling of the city of Kharkiv also killed at least one civilian on Friday morning. Russian missiles again hit port facilities and a university building in the southern port city of Mykolaiv.
Kyiv’s military actions stand out
Kyiv has withheld any official comment on the incidents in Crimea or inside Russia while hinting that it is behind them using long-range weapons or sabotage.
A Western official indicated on Friday that at least some of the incidents were Ukrainian attacks, saying Kyiv was constantly producing “kinetic effects” far behind Russian lines.
Huge explosions on August 9 at Russia’s Saky airbase on the Crimean coast had knocked out more than half of the Black Sea Fleet’s fighter jets, the official said, in what would be one of the costliest attacks of the war.
Russia has denied any planes were damaged in what it called a crash, although satellite images showed at least eight burnt-out warplanes and several huge impact craters. Earlier this week, Moscow sacked the head of the Black Sea Fleet.
Ukraine hopes its apparent new ability to hit Russian targets behind the front line can turn the tide of the conflict, disrupting the supply lines Moscow needs to sustain its occupation.
Since last month, Ukraine has been deploying advanced Western-supplied rockets to strike behind Russian lines. Some explosions reported in Crimea and Belgorod exceed the range of munitions Western countries have acknowledged sending so far.
A senior Ukrainian official said about half of the incidents in Crimea were Ukrainian attacks of some kind and half were accidents caused by Russia’s poor operations. He pointed out that the attacks were carried out by saboteurs rather than long-range weapons, although he did not say whether Kyiv now had ATACMS, a longer-range version of the US HIMARS rockets he started. for use in June.
The official, who declined to be named, said Ukraine hoped its strikes would have a greater impact on reducing Russian artillery power, but that Moscow was adapting.
Moscow fears it has nuclear power plant projects
Ukraine also issued dire warnings about a frontline nuclear power plant, the Zaporizhzhia complex, where it said it believed Moscow was planning a “large-scale provocation” to justify decoupling the plant from the Ukrainian power grid. and connect it to that of Russia.
“If Russian radiation blackmail continues, this summer could go down in the history of various European nations as one of the most tragic ever. Because no nuclear power plant in the world has a procedure for a terrorist state to turn a nuclear power plant into a target,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a speech late Friday.
Continuing the mutual blame game, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Ukraine of bombing the complex, risking a nuclear disaster.
Ukraine’s nuclear operator said on Friday it suspected Moscow was planning to switch the Zaporizhzhia power plant to the Russian grid, a complex operation that Kyiv said could spell disaster.
The power station is held by Russian troops at the edge of a tank; Ukrainian forces control the opposite bank.
The United Nations and Ukraine want to reach an agreement to end the fighting around Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, but Russia has called the idea of a demilitarized zone unacceptable.
Macron and Putin discuss the nuclear power plant
Moscow has rejected international calls to demilitarize the plant and Putin on Friday renewed his accusation that Kyiv was bombing it during a phone call with French President Emmanuel Macron, according to the Kremlin’s reading of the call.
Macron’s office said Putin had accepted a mission from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to Zaporizhzhia.
Hours after speaking with Putin, Macron on Friday accused the Russian leader of launching a “brutal attack” on Ukraine in an imperialist and revengeful violation of international law.
Macron, who has tried tirelessly but unsuccessfully to prevent the invasion and has long touted the importance of dialogue with Putin, has become increasingly critical of the Russian president as the war continues.
He warned French citizens that the the resulting energy and economic crisis for Europe is not over, calling it “the price of our freedom and our values”.
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