Ukraine on Friday launched another “massive attack” inside Russia as the Kremlin scrambled to get reinforcements to the area and nailed a Ukraine mall in Donetsk with a missile, killing at least 14.
The Ukrainian military said its drones struck a key military airfield in Russia’s Lipetsk region overnight, damaging stockpiles of guided bombs and causing a series of detonations.
The attack occurred four days after hundreds of Ukrainian troops poured across the Russian border into Kursk in a surprise assault — for what appeared to be Kyiv’s biggest attack on its Goliath neighbor since the Kremlin invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
Ukraine has been attacking Russian airbases in its new offensive to reduce Moscow’s ability to use warplanes to strike targets in Ukraine and hammer front lines with guided bombs and missiles, Reuters reported.
The Ukrainian military moved farther into Russia with Friday’s attack on Lipetsk.
“Several sources of ignition were recorded, a large fire broke out and multiple detonations were observed,” Kyiv’s military said on the Telegram messaging app.
The Russian governor of the Lipetsk region, Igor Artamonov, said a “massive attack” by Ukrainian drones had caused explosions, disrupted power supply and wounded at least nine people.
The Interfax news agency cited local emergency officials as saying a fire had broken out at the airbase outside the regional capital.
Russia declared a “federal-level” emergency in the Kursk region after the Ukrainian infiltration earlier in the week and sent reinforcements there on Friday.
Kursk was still reporting missile danger alerts as of Friday, according to Google-translated Telegram updates from regional Gov. Alexei Smirnov, who said the local situation remained “difficult.”
In retaliation for the onslaught, a Russian plane launched a missile into a Ukrainian shopping mall in the middle of Friday, killing at least 14 people and wounding 44 others, according to Minister of Internal Affairs Ihor Klymenko in a Google-translated Telegram update.
The mall in Kostiantynivka, in the eastern Donetsk region, is located in the town’s residential area. Thick black smoke rose above it after the strike.
“This is another targeted attack on a crowded place, another act of terror by the Russians,” Donetsk regional head Vadym Filashkin said in a Telegram post.
It was the second major strike on the town in almost a year. Last September, a Russian missile hit an outdoor market there, killing 17.
The attack against the Lipetsk airfield came after Ukraine’s military Saturday said it had carried out a strike on Russia’s Morozovsk airfield in the Rostov region, claiming it had hit warehouses with ammunition locally.
In the same offensive, the Ukrainian force said it had also targeted a number of oil depots and fuel and lubricant storage facilities in Rostov, Kursk and Belgorod.
“Russian combat aircraft must be destroyed wherever they are, by all effective means. Hitting Russian airfields is also quite fair,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a Google-translated Telegram update Aug. 3, after the Morozovsk strike.
With Post wires
