Russia hit the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia with multiple guided bombs on Sunday, wounding at least 16 people and damaging railways, infrastructure and residential and commercial buildings, Ukrainian officials said. Russian forces hit three districts in the south-eastern city with a total of 13 guided bombs between 5am and 7am, the governor of Zaporizhzhia region said. The strikes injured at least 16 people, including two children aged eight and 17, Ivan Fedorov said. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on the Telegram messaging app that several residential buildings, the city’s infrastructure and railways were damaged, and posting pictures from the attack sites showing charred cars, a hole blown through a residential building and rescuers battling fires. Local officials said trains were delayed and diverted while rescuers cleared the debris.
The management of the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station said Ukrainian forces had launched a new attack on a nearby electricity substation, destroying a transformer. The plant’s management said on Telegram on Sunday that an artillery strike had hit the transformer at the “Raduga” substation in the town of Enerhodar in south-eastern Ukraine. It described the incident as aimed at “destabilising the situation in the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant’s satellite city”, posting a photograph showing smoke billowing from the top of a building. Ukrainian officials did not immediately comment on the claim, but the foreign minister, Andriy Sybiha, has previously accused Russia of planning strikes on Ukrainian nuclear facilities before the winter.
Russia launched several waves of drones targeting Kyiv early on Monday but air defence successfully defended the city, Ukraine’s military said. Reuters’ witnesses heard numerous blasts in the Ukrainian capital in what sounded like air defence systems in operation and saw objects being hit in the air. All the drones Russia launched at Kyiv were either destroyed by defence systems or neutralised by electronic warfare, Serhiy Popko, the head of Kyiv’s military administration, said on Telegram. According to preliminary information, there were no casualties and no damage reported, he said.
Ukraine said it sent more than 100 drones deep inside Russia to hit a major weapons depot on Sunday, as it stepped up attacks further inside Russian territory. “Defence forces struck the Kotluban military depot” in the Volgograd region, hundreds of kilometres from the Ukrainian border, a day after a shipment of Iranian weapons reportedly arrived at the site, Ukraine’s military general staff wrote on Telegram on Sunday. “A fire and ammunition detonation were observed on the depot’s territory,” the post said, adding that the facility was being used for storage and the modernisation of missiles and artillery. Russia did not confirm the strike, reporting only that it had destroyed 67 drones overnight in the Volgograd region. A Ukrainian defence sector source told media that 120 drones had flown more than 600km (370 miles) to target the depot early on Sunday.
Russia’s defence ministry said on Sunday its forces had repelled six new Ukrainian attempts to enter its western Kursk region and had also taken control of the settlement of Makiivka in eastern Ukraine’s Luhansk region. The ministry said on Telegram that its forces, with the support of aircraft and artillery, repelled attempts to enter the region near the village of Novy Put, about 80km (50 miles) west of Sudzha, a strategic crossing point for Russian natural gas exports to Europe via Ukraine. Ukrainian forces raided the Kursk region on 6 August and Zelenskyy said earlier this month that his forces controlled 100 settlements over an area of more than 1,300 sq km (500 sq miles). Russian sources dispute this figure and Moscow says it has since taken back some villages in a counterattack. The defence ministry said 50 Ukrainian servicemen had been killed and injured in the latest attempted Kursk incursion, and that a tank and four combat armoured vehicles as well as a car were destroyed. Ukraine has not commented. The battlefield reports could not be confirmed.
Denmark said it was unlocking 1.3bn kroner ($194m) to help Ukraine bolster its arsenal against Russia’s invasion. The weapons and equipment would be produced in Ukraine but financed by Denmark and frozen Russian assets, the Danish defence ministry said on Sunday. The Scandinavian country also announced the creation of a joint defence hub in Kyiv designed to help develop of new partnerships. “Wars are not only won on the battlefield but also in industry,” the trade and industry minister, Morten Bodskov, said in a statement.
Norway may put a fence along part or all of the 198km (123-mile) border it shares with Russia, a minister said, a move inspired by a similar project in its neighbour Finland. “A border fence is very interesting, not only because it can act as a deterrent but also because it contains sensors and technology that allow you to detect if people are moving close to the border,” the justice minister, Emilie Enger Mehl, told Norwegian public broadcaster NRK published late on Saturday. She said the Norwegian government was currently looking at “several measures” to beef up security on the border with Russia in the Arctic north, such as fencing, increasing the number of border staff or stepping up monitoring.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday marked the 83rd anniversary of a Nazi massacre of more than 30,000 Jewish people at the Babyn Yar ravine near Kyiv in 1941 – the largest massacre by the Germans and their local collaborators of Jewish people in Ukraine during the second world war. The Ukrainian president said on X: “Babyn Yar is a terrifying symbol, showing that the most heinous crimes occur when the world chooses to ignore, remain silent, stay indifferent, and lacks the determination to stand up against evil.”
