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Ukraine has targeted an airfield deep inside Russia in a drone attack aiming to destroy Russian glide bombs that have been used to target Ukrainian border regions.
Footage showed thick black smoke billowing above the Marinovka airfield in Volgograd, where the one-tonne bombs – used to flatten Ukrainian buildings – were believed to have been hit at 3.30am.
Up to 28 drones were launched across Russia by Ukraine in the attack, according to the Russian defence ministry, with Moscow claiming the airfield fire was caused by falling debris.
“Most of the drones were destroyed. As a result of the UAV crash, a fire broke out on the territory of a defence ministry facility,” Andrey Bocharov, the region’s governor, said.
However, a Ukrainian security source said a storage site for fuel and glide bombs was hit in the early morning attack.
The source added that the attack was part of a campaign of Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian airfields that are used by warplanes to conduct regular attacks on targets in Ukraine.
In recent months, Kyiv has flagged Russia’s use of the cheaply-produced glide bombs dropped by Putin’s warplanes as a particular menace to Ukrainian settlements in the east.
It comes as Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelesnky visited Ukraine’s border Sumy region, close to where his military launched a shock attack across the border into Russia’s Kursk.
Mr Zelensky said he had met his top commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, during the visit, nearly two weeks after the cross-border offensive which is estimated to have taken around 300 square miles of territory.
However, Russia said its troops had beaten back an attempt by a Ukrainian force to infiltrate its border in a different region to Kyiv’s initial incursion.
The raid took place about 240km (150 miles) from the site of the Ukrainian incursion into the Kursk region in western Russia.
Authorities in Kursk said they had begun installing concrete shelters to help protect civilians amid the Ukrainian incursion.
Ukrainian troops piled through the Russian border into Kursk on 6 August in a surprise assault after its troops had failed to make any significant gains on their own territory since late 2022.
Kyiv has announced a string of battlefield successes since mounting the action, but Moscow has been inching forward in eastern Ukraine for months, pressuring troops worn down by hard years of fighting following Russia’s invasion in February 2022.
The Russian defence ministry said on Thursday its forces had captured the village of Mezhove in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.
Meanwhile, Russian president Vladimir Putin has also accused Ukraine of trying to strike Russia’s Kursk nuclear power plant in an overnight attack and said Moscow had informed the UN nuclear safety watchdog about the situation.
Acting Kursk governor Alexei Smirnov told Putin that the situation at the Kursk plant, which has four Soviet graphite-moderated RBMK-1000 reactors, was “stable”.
“The enemy tried to strike at the nuclear power plant during the night today,” Putin told a meeting of senior officials about the situation in Russian border regions.
“The International Atomic Energy Agency has been informed, they promise to come themselves and send specialists to assess the situation,” Putin said.
He did not provide further details about the incident or provide documentary evidence to back up his assertion. There was no immediate comment from Ukraine.
Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), on 9 August appealed for maximum restraint to avoid a nuclear accident at the Kursk plant.
Two of the RBMK-1000 reactors are in shutdown and two are fully operational. Construction of Kursk-2, essentially new reactors of the VVER-TOI type, was begun in 2018.
