Ukraine has carried out a night-time drone attack on a Kremlin military airfield near the city of Volgograd and announced the capture of another village in Russia’s Kursk region, as Russian forces pressed on with their advance in the Donetsk region.
Volgograd’s governor, Andrei Bocharov, said the strike took place at about 3am. Local people reported a series of explosions. Several hours later, ammunition continued to detonate as a vast carpet of black smoke engulfed the area.
Ukraine’s SBU security service said it carried out the remote raid against the Marinovka airbase, about 45 miles (70km) west of Volgograd, near the city of Kalach-na-Donu.
The base is home to about 30 Su-34 and Su-35 fighter jets. The planes carry out regular bombing runs against Ukrainian positions on the frontline about 280 miles away, the SBU told the Kyiv Independent newspaper. It is unclear how many jets were damaged or destroyed.
One Russian witness filming the destruction suggested the airfield had been wiped out. “It’s a serious tragedy, folks. This is serious stuff. It’s all fucking on fire. And it’s fucking smoke. It’s all fucking exploding. That’s it,” he said as detonations continued.
10/10 Dostoevsky moment with a Russian guy witnessing the Marinovka air base following a Ukrainian drone assault.
— Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 (@IAPonomarenko) August 22, 2024
“There it is flying by, fuck. Fucking flying over again, fuck. It’s all fucking fucked up! Everything. It’s fucked as fuck. They’re fucking bombing it since 2.30 am,… pic.twitter.com/FUkggkHYDi
Ukraine is waging an increasingly ambitious long-range drone campaign against critical Russian infrastructure, hitting more than 200 targets. They include oil depots, refineries and arms factories. Last week it struck two airbases: Borisoglebsk, 150 miles inside Russia, and Savasleyka, about 400 miles away.
On Tuesday it launched a major attack on Moscow and sent drones to the Arctic Murmansk region, more than 1,000 miles away, where Russian strategic bombers are located. Russia’s defence ministry said it downed all hostile unmanned aerial vehicles that infiltrated its territory.
Earlier on Thursday, drones hit a railway ferry with fuel tanks in the port of Kavkaz, not far from the road and rail bridge linking the Russian mainland with occupied Crimea. Black smoke billowed above the water. Kyiv has said it will knock out the “illegal” crossing across the Kerch Strait.
Also on Thursday, Volodymyr Zelenskiy travelled to the border area in Sumy region, from where Ukrainian troops sprang their surprise 6 August incursion deep into Russia. The president met his commander-in-chief, Col Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi.
I visited the border area of the Sumy region and held a meeting with Commander-in-Chief Syrskyi and the Head of the Sumy Regional Military Administration.
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) August 22, 2024
The Commander-in-Chief reported on the operational situation across all active combat zones, with a particular focus on the… pic.twitter.com/GvaCEAUBBj
One goal of the operation is to relieve pressure on Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, where Russian combat units have been pressing forward. So far this has not happened, with Moscow instead sending reinforcements from the rear and the occupied south of Ukraine. If anything it has stepped up the tempo of attack around the town of Pokrovsk, a key Ukrainian military hub.
In recent months, Russian forces have swallowed up villages to the east of Pokrovsk and are now a mere 7 miles away. They have advanced to within 3 miles of the neighbouring town of Myrnohrad. On Thursday people were packing up to leave, with shops, banks and other organisations having closed this week. The mood was said to be calm despite expectations of an imminent Russian assault.
Speaking in the Sumy area, Zelenskiy said the Ukrainian-controlled “buffer zone” on the Russian side of the border was saving lives. “Since the start of the Kursk operation there has been less shelling and fewer civilian casualties in the Sumy region,” he said. The armed forces had seized another settlement, he added, and taken more Russian soldiers as prisoners.
According to Telegram channels, Ukrainian soldiers have captured the village of Krasno-Oktyabrskoye, next to the Seym River. They previously destroyed three bridges and two pontoon crossings on the same stretch of frontline, using US-supplied Himars rockets, and pounded the Russian border town of Tetkino, farther west.
Several thousand Russian troops are now marooned in the Glushkovsky district south of the river. Ukraine is seeking to advance there and to increase its 480-square-mile bridgehead inside enemy territory. Video suggests Russian units are putting up strong resistance, with fierce battles in the town of Korenevo and elsewhere.
On Thursday Vladimir Putin accused Ukraine of trying to attack the Kursk nuclear power station. “The enemy tried to strike the nuclear power plant at night. The International Atomic Energy Agency has been informed,” Putin said during a televised government meeting.
Putin did not present any evidence for his claims or provide further details on the alleged attack.
The IAEA released a statement saying it had been told by Moscow drone fragments were found roughly 100 metres from the Kursk plant’s spent fuel nuclear storage facility.
The nuclear watchdog said its chief would visit the facility next week.
Russia’s FSB spy agency, meanwhile, has issued an arrest warrant for journalists working for CNN after they travelled on assignment to the Russian town of Sudzha, which is under the control of Ukraine’s military. The reporters include Nick Paton-Walsh, CNN’s chief international security correspondent, and two Ukrainian colleagues. Paton-Walsh, who is British, was the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent in the early 2000s.
This week the Kremlin summoned a senior US diplomat in Moscow and complained about “provocative” trips by American journalists to Russian territory.
Overall, Putin has played down Ukraine’s invasion, which is the first attack on Russia soil since the second world war. In a meeting with the heads of the affected border regions, he discussed the humanitarian situation without explaining what had caused it. More than 122,000 Russians living in the Kursk zone have fled.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the head of Zelenskiy’s office, said the Kremlin had deliberately chosen to ignore bad news. “It is currently unable to counter the actions of Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region. To quell the growing anxiety among the population, our army’s advance and the loss of territory is being presented as a ‘new normal’,” he wrote on X.
