Moscow (Brussels Morning Newspaper) – Russian authorities said that their air defence units destroyed 88 Ukrainian drones overnight with no damages or injury reported.
The Russian defence ministry stated that 52 of the drones were shot down over the border,
Belgorod area, while 13 were over the Lipetsk area and nine were over the Rostov region, both in Russia’s southwest.
In addition to these drones, others were downed over Russia’s Voronezh, Krasnodar, Ryazan, Astrakhan, and Kursk regions. Governors of the Ryazan and Lipetsk regions stated overnight that their regions were under air raid warnings, but they did not note any harm or injuries.
Russia’s aviation watchdog Rosaviatsia expressed that the airports of Nizhny Novgorod, Astrakhan and Kazan were shut for traffic for several hours overnight to maintain air safety.
Unofficial Russian news Telegram channels noted that the Ukrainian invasion on Ryazan and Lipetsk aimed at local oil refineries.
Ukrainian Lieutenant Andriy Kovalenko stated that without providing proof or saying directly that Ukrainian drones were engaged, that the Novolipetsk Metallurgical Plant in Lipetsk was under raid. He runs the Center for Countering Disinformation, part of the National Security and Defense Council.
How are Ukrainian drone strikes impacting Russia’s war efforts?
Ukraine has intensified its attacks in the war. The attacks are aimed at eliminating infrastructure critical to Moscow’s war efforts and are in reaction to Russia’s continued bombing of Ukraine.
Over the past few weeks, Russia is seeing it “significantly” harder to achieve combat operations against Ukraine because of an advancement in Ukrainian long-range drone strikes on Russian weapons supplies, ammunition stations and fuel refineries, a senior commander has stated.
Russian Brigadier General Yuriy Shchygol hinted that these attacks would grow, indicating that his country intends to more than quadruple the production rate of deep strike drones – with a capacity of hundreds of miles to more than 2,000 aircraft a month.
