Mayor says no damage or casualties reported as 11 drones are downed
Ukraine’s military said it struck an S-300 anti-aircraft missile system based in Russia’s southern Rostov region overnight.
Kyiv’s general staff said the attack took place near the settlement of Novoshakhtinsk, and that S-300s had been used to attack civilian infrastructure in Ukraine, Reuters reported.
Ukraine has said large numbers of Russian servicemen – reportedly in the hundreds – gave themselves up during the Kursk offensive that began on 6 August. Agence France-Presse has visited a detention centre just across the border in Ukraine’s Sumy region.
One 22-year-old Russian PoW – a conscript – said he and others were “simply abandoned by our command” when Ukrainian troops appeared and now he hoped “to be exchanged and go back home … to my family”. The deputy head of the detention facility, who gave his name as Volodymyr, told AFP that the PoWs were initially afraid but “came to life” after realising they were being well treated.
Ukraine’s army chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said its forces had reached 28-35km (17-22 miles) into Russia’s Kursk region, while Moscow was moving some of its troops from other directions to strengthen positions there. Russia has formed three new military groupings to bolster security in regions bordering Ukraine, the Russian defence minister, Andrei Belousov, has said.
The internationally sanctioned, Kremlin-linked newspaper Izvestia has quoted Russian intelligence as saying US, British and Polish intelligence were involved in preparing the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk. Voldymyr Zelenskiy has insisted Ukraine’s allies were not informed as they would have ruled out the plan as “unrealistic”; while other officials and analysts have said telling the US and others would have made it impossible to keep the operation secret, based on past leaks.
Russia hit energy infrastructure in northern Ukraine in a missile and drone attack and caused a huge fire that released chlorine into the air, Ukrainian officials said on Tuesday. The fumes came from an industrial facility that was attacked in the western region of Ternopil.
Ukrainian forces shot down three ballistic missiles and 25 of the 26 drones launched in Tuesday morning’s attack on nine regions, Ukraine’s air force commander said. It included Russia’s fifth missile attack this month on Kyiv, the capital.
