A “massive drone attack” was reported to have hit a military air base deep inside Russia.
The Ukrainian military said on Friday it had struck a Russian military airfield in the Lipetsk region of western Russia overnight, damaging stockpiles of guided bombs and causing a series of detonations.
Kyiv has been attacking Russian air bases to reduce Moscow’s ability to use its warplanes to strike targets in Ukraine and hammer front lines with guided bombs and missiles.
“Several sources of ignition were recorded, a large fire broke out and multiple detonations were observed,” Kyiv’s military said.
Russian Su-34, Su-35 and MiG-31 warplanes were based at the airfield, 200 miles inside Russia, it added.
A security source said the attack was carried out by drones as dozens of planes and helicopters stood on the airfield, as well as a warehouse containing 700 guided bombs.
The Russian governor of the Lipetsk region, Igor Artamonov said a “massive attack” by Ukrainian drones had caused explosions, disrupted power supply and wounded nine people.
The Ukrainian source said most of the Russian aircraft did not have time to take off.
“In early August we cleared the Morozovsk airfield of guided bombs and fighters, today it’s the turn of Lipetsk-2,” the source said.
Last Saturday, Ukraine said it had hit an ammunition depot at the Morozovsk airfield, where it said Russian forces stored guided aerial bombs and other equipment and had a number of fuel storage facilities.
Ukraine’s ability to strike military targets deep inside Russia has been hampered by its lack of long-range missiles.
It has been appealing to the West to allow it to use Western-supplied weapons for such strikes.
British military expert Professor Michael Clarke told Sky News: “This attack on Lipetsk is the most significant airfield attack so far that I can think of in the war to date.”
The attack aimed to damage Russia’s capability to launch waves of “glide bombs” from aircraft over Russia into Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Putin’s military was engaged in a fourth day of fighting against Ukranian troops who launched a surprise raid into western Russia.
The Defence Ministry in Moscow said on Friday its forces “continue to repel” a Ukrainian attempt to break into the Kursk region.
Russian forces were still battling Ukrainian troops after they smashed through the Russian border on Tuesday.
Russia’s emergency ministry declared a federal state of emergency in the Kursk region on Friday after the major Ukrainian incursion this week.
In one of the biggest Ukrainian attacks on Russia since the war began in February 2022, around 1,000 Ukrainian troops rammed through the Russian border in the early hours of August 6 with tanks and armoured vehicles, covered in the air by swarms of drones and pounding artillery, according to Russian officials.
Heavy fighting was reported near the town of Sudzha, where Russian natural gas flows into Ukraine, raising concerns about a possible sudden stop to transit flows to Europe.
The incursion has come as a shock to Russia, nearly two-and-a-half years after Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Kursk’s regional acting governor, Alexei Smirnov, said thousands of residents had been evacuated.
Russia’s defence ministry said on Thursday that the army and the Federal Security Service (FSB) had halted Ukraine’s advance and were battling Kyiv’s units in the Kursk region.
“Units of the Northern group of forces, together with the FSB of Russia, continue to destroy armed formations of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Sudzhensky and Korenevsky districts of the Kursk region, directly adjacent to the Russian-Ukrainian border,” the ministry said.
The Ukrainian military has remained silent on the Kursk offensive, though President Volodymyr Zelensky praised the Ukrainian army on Thursday for its ability “to surprise” and achieve results. He did not explicitly reference Kursk.
Some Russian bloggers said Ukraine’s forces were pushing towards the Kursk nuclear power station, which lies about 37 miles northeast of Sudzha.
Ukraine wants to pin down Russian forces, which control 18 per cent of its territory, though the strategic significance of the border offensive was not immediately clear.
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said the Ukrainian attack was an attempt to force Moscow to divert resources from the front and to show the West that Ukraine could still fight.
Russian forces continue to seize more territory in eastern Ukraine, but are suffering heavy losses, according to British defence chiefs.
