Kyiv was targeted early Wednesday by the “most powerful” barrage of missiles and drones since the spring, authorities said, with two people reported dead, as Russia claimed it destroyed four Ukrainian boats in the Black Sea carrying up to 50 soldiers.
More than 20 missiles and drones were “destroyed by air defence forces” overnight, the Kyiv City Military Administration wrote on Telegram, describing the aerial assault as “the most powerful” to hit the city since the spring.
Ukrainian drones swept across Russia in overnight attacks that damaged military aircraft and disrupted air traffic, Russian officials said early on Wednesday, hours after the funeral service for Russian mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Attacks by unmanned aircraft were reported in Pskov, Bryansk, Kaluga, Orlov and Ryazan regions as well as the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula, Russian officials said.
The attack on six regions in Russia is believed to be the largest on Russian soil since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the Associated Press reports.
The most significant attack appeared to be in Pskov, where Russian officials said four Il-76 military transport planes were damaged. Poskov lies about 660 km (411 miles) north of the Ukrainian frontier, near the borders with Estonia and Latvia.
Russia’s defence ministry said that it had destroyed military boats in the Black Sea carrying up to 50 Ukrainian paratroops. An aircraft “destroyed four high-speed military boats” in the Black Sea around midnight Moscow time, the Russian defence ministry wrote on Telegram. The boats had been carrying “landing groups of Ukrainian special operations forces with a total number of up to 50 people”, the ministry said. It did not give details on exactly where in the Black Sea the claimed incident took place.
Early on Wednesday, the local Moscow-installed governor Mikhail Razvozhayev was cited as saying by Tass that Russian defences repelled a “seaborne drone attack” near Sevastopol Bay in Crimea. Sevastopol is the base of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. “Anti-submarine … forces have completed their work,” Razvozhayev said, without giving details.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has announced a new package of military assistance to aid Ukraine. The package includes additional mine clearing equipment, missiles for air defense, ammunition for artillery and high bar systems, and over three million rounds of small arms ammunition, Blinken said in a statement.
A “farewell ceremony” for Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was killed in a plane crash last week, took place behind closed doors, his spokespeople said on Tuesday in a statement on social media. Russian mercenaries also gathered for the funeral of Valery Chekalov, one of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s deputies who was killed with his boss in a plane crash last week, as the Kremlin said Vladimir Putin had no plans to attend Prigozhin’s funeral.
A Moscow court on Tuesday extended for three months the detention of a former US consular employee accused of gathering information for Washington on the war in Ukraine and other issues, Tass news agency reported. Tass quoted the press service of the Lefortovo court as saying that a three-month extension requested by investigators until 23 November had been granted for the detention of Robert Shonov, a Russian national.
Russian shelling killed a 45-year-old civilian man in the Ukrainian town of Kupiansk, according to local officials, as Moscow’s forces try to advance in north-eastern Ukraine.
An FSB security services helicopter crashed on Tuesday in central Russia, leaving three people dead, regional officials said.
More than 1,300 schools have been totally destroyed in government-held areas of Ukraine since Russia’s 2022 invasion, Unicef has said.
Ukraine said on Tuesday that its forces had pushed deeper into Russian defensive lines near the village of Robotyne, a day after claiming control over the village on the southern front.
Vladimir Putin will skip the G20 summit in India next month and will send his foreign minister instead, said the office of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi.
