Ukraine strikes airfield near Volgograd as Russia presses forward in Donetsk | Ukraine

As Russian forces continued their advance into Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine said it had carried out a nighttime drone attack on a Kremlin military airfield near the city of Volgograd and captured another village in Russia’s Kursk Oblast.

Volgograd Governor Andrei Bocharov said the attack took place at about 3 a.m. Local residents reported a series of explosions, and hours later, munitions continued to explode, engulfing the area in a vast carpet of black smoke.

Ukraine’s SBU security service said it carried out a remote attack on Malinovka airbase near the city of Karach-on-Don, about 45 miles (70 kilometers) west of Volgograd.

The base is home to about 30 Su-34 and Su-35 fighter jets that regularly carry out bombing raids on Ukrainian forward positions about 280 miles away, the SBU said. He told the Kyiv Independent.It is unclear how many jets were damaged or destroyed.

One Russian witness filming the destruction suggested the airfield was destroyed: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is a serious tragedy. This is serious. Everything is burning. And there’s smoke. Everything is exploding. That’s it,” he said as explosions continued.

Ukraine has been conducting an increasingly ambitious long-range drone campaign against Russian critical infrastructure, hitting more than 200 targets, including oil depots, refineries and arms factories, including two airbases last week, Borisoglebsk, 150 miles inside Russia, and Savagelyka, about 400 miles away.

Russia launched a major attack on Moscow on Tuesday, sending drones into the Murmansk region in the Arctic, more than 1,000 miles away where Russian strategic bombers are based. The Russian Defense Ministry said it had shot down all enemy unmanned aerial vehicles that had entered its territory.

Early Thursday morning, drone Fuel tank hits rail ferry Black smoke rose above the water at the Caucasus port, not far from a road and rail bridge linking mainland Russia with the occupied Crimean peninsula, and Kiev said it was blocking “illegal” crossings across the Kerch Strait.

Also on Thursday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the border region of Sumy, the site of a surprise Ukrainian military incursion into Russia on Aug. 6. The president met with Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief, Colonel-General Oleksandr Shirsky.

One of the aims of the operation is to relieve pressure on Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, where Russian combat forces are advancing. So far, this has not happened, and Moscow has instead sent reinforcements from the rear and from occupied southern Ukraine, stepping up the tempo of its attacks on the area around the Ukrainian military stronghold of the city of Pokrovsk.

Russian forces have occupied villages east of Pokrovsk in recent months, and are now just seven miles away, and have advanced to within three miles of the neighboring town of Mirnokhrad. People began preparing to evacuate on Thursday, and shops, banks and other establishments have closed this week. The mood is said to be calm, despite expectations of an imminent Russian attack.

Speaking in the Sumy region, Zelensky said a Ukrainian-controlled “buffer zone” on the Russian side of the border was saving lives. “Since the start of Operation Kursk, shelling in the Sumy region has decreased and civilian casualties have fallen,” he said. He added that troops had taken another settlement and taken more Russian soldiers prisoner.

According to the Telegram channel, Ukrainian forces have captured the village of Krasno-Oktyabrskoye on the Seim River. They had previously used US-supplied Himars rockets to destroy three bridges and two piers on the same front, and attacked the Russian border town of Tetkino further west.

Thousands of Russian troops are now stranded in the Grushkovsky district south of the river, where Ukraine is trying to advance and expand its bridgehead across 480 square miles of enemy territory. Video footage shows Russian forces putting up stiff resistance and heavy fighting in the town of Korenev and elsewhere.

President Vladimir Putin on Thursday accused Ukraine of trying to attack the Kursk nuclear power plant. “The enemy tried to attack the nuclear power plant at night. We have reported this to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA),” Putin said at a televised government meeting.

Putin did not provide any evidence to support his claims or provide any further details about the alleged attack.

The IAEA said in a statement that it had been informed by Moscow that debris from the drone had been found about 100 metres from a spent fuel storage facility at the Kursk nuclear power plant.

The nuclear watchdog said its director plans to visit the facility next week.

Meanwhile, Russia’s intelligence agency, the FSB, has issued arrest warrants for CNN journalists who were on a mission to the Russian town of Suzha, which is under Ukrainian military control. The journalists include CNN’s chief international security correspondent Nick Paton-Walsh and two Ukrainian colleagues. Paton-Walsh, a British national, was The Guardian’s Moscow correspondent in the early 2000s.

The Kremlin summoned a senior US diplomat in Moscow earlier this week to complain about a “provocative” visit by an American journalist to Russian territory.

Putin has generally downplayed the Ukrainian invasion, the first attack on Russian territory since World War II. In meetings with leaders of affected border regions, Putin discussed the humanitarian situation but did not explain the causes. More than 122,000 Russians living in the Kursk region have been evacuated.

Mykhailo Podolyakh, an adviser to Zelenskyy’s presidential administration, said the Kremlin deliberately chose to ignore the bad news. “Right now the Kremlin is unable to counter the actions of the Ukrainian armed forces in the Kursk region. In order to calm the growing fears among the population, our military advances and territorial losses are being presented as the ‘new normal,'” he said. I wrote to X.