The United States has not been helping Ukraine launch audacious drone strikes hundreds of miles into Russian territory, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said.
A fire broke out at an airport in Russia’s southern Kursk region, that borders Ukraine, after a drone hit the facility, the region’s governor said on Tuesday.
In a second incident, an industrial plant 50 miles from the Ukrainian border was also targeted by drones, which missed a fuel depot at the site, Russian media reported.
Ukrainian officials did not formally confirm carrying out drone strikes inside Russia, and they have maintained ambiguity over previous high-profile attacks.
Asked about the strikes, Defence Minister Oleskiy Reznikov repeated a longstanding joke blaming carelessness with cigarettes. “Very often Russians smoke in places where it’s forbidden to smoke,” he said.
The United States, wary of escalating the conflict with nuclear weapon-ready Russia, has never admitted to supplying long-range weapons to Ukraine but said they would not stop them from developing their own.
The UK’s Ministry of Defence said Russia was likely to consider the attacks on Russian bases more than 300 miles from the border with Ukraine as “some of the most strategically significant failures of force protection since its invasion of Ukraine”.
At a briefing on Tuesday, Mr Blinken accused Russia of “trying to take out the civilian infrastructure that is allowing people to have heat, to have water, to have electricity”.
He said Moscow was now “weaponising winter” and “that is the daily and nightly reality in Ukraine”.
“We have neither encouraged nor enabled the Ukrainians to strike inside of Russia, but the important thing is to understand what Ukrainians are living through every day with the ongoing Russian aggression against their country.”
He said he was determined that Ukrainians have “the equipment that they need to defend themselves, to defend their territory, to defend their freedom.”
US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin insisted that the US would not prevent Ukraine from developing its own long-range strike capability.
“The short answer is no. We are absolutely not doing that,” Mr Austin said, reinforcing that Washington had already given Ukraine more than £16bn in security assistance.
A Russian pro-war blogger posting on the Telegram channel “Milinfolive” on Monday hit out at Russian military leadership, alleging that incompetence and lack of proper fortifications at the airbases made Ukrainian drone strikes possible.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said three Russian servicemen were killed and four others wounded by debris, and that two aircraft were slightly damaged in the strikes Monday.
Moscow blamed Kyiv for unprecedented attacks on two air bases deep inside Russia a day earlier. The attacks on the Engels base in the Saratov region on the Volga River and the Dyagilevo base in the Ryazan region in western Russia were some of the most audacious inside Russia during the war.
Russia’s retaliatory strikes killed Ukrainian civilians and crippled energy supplies leaving half of households in the Kyiv region without electricity.
