Ukrainian drone strikes kill eight in Russian regions
Ukrainian drone strikes killed eight people in Russia and injured more than 60, Russian officials said.
Kiev forces are continuing their relentless air campaign against energy infrastructure and military targets inside Russia, aimed at undermining Moscow’s war efforts and making Russians feel the consequences of the Kremlin’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, now in its fifth year.
Two sprawling warehouses of Wildberries, Russia’s largest online retailer, were hit by Ukrainian drones overnight: one in the town of Kotovsk in the Tambov region, about 360 kilometers from the Ukrainian border, and the other in the city of Elektrostal, about 50 kilometers east of Moscow, according to Russian officials.
Both caught fire, but Wildberries founder Tatyana Kim said later Saturday morning that the fire in Kotovsk had been extinguished.
Photos and footage published by Russian online outlets showed a fire at the Elektrostal plant with a large cloud of smoke rising.
A Ukrainian drone also struck an oil depot in the city of Noginsk, just north of Elektrostal, causing a fire and prompting the evacuation of a nearby maternity hospital and a residential building, Moscow region governor Andrei Vorobyov said.
Ukraine’s long-range strikes hit “two important logistics facilities in the Moscow and Tambov regions,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a Telegram post on Saturday.
“These facilities were used by the attacker to supply approved components for the production of unmanned aerial vehicles and navigation equipment,” he wrote.
He said an oil facility was also hit.
Tambov regional governor Yevgeny Pervyshov said seven night shift workers were killed and 25 others were injured at the warehouse in Kotovsk.
Stating that a total of 37 people were injured in the Moscow region, Vorobyov said that one of them later died in the hospital.
Drone debris also hit a kindergarten building in Elektrostal, sparking a fire that has since been extinguished, Vorobyov said.
Vladimir governor Alexander Avdeyev said that a Ukrainian drone crashed into a residential building in the city of Vladimir, about 180 kilometers east of Moscow, causing a short-term fire, but there were no casualties.
Zelenskiy said that Ukrainian special operations also carried out attacks on targets in the Sea of Azov and the occupied territories.
Overall, the Russian defense ministry said its air defense intercepted 379 Ukrainian drones overnight in 19 regions of Russia, as well as in illegally annexed Crimea, the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea.
