Ukrainian drone flies 800km from front line to hit target in Russia’s Chechnya
By Samya Kullab
Kyiv: A Ukrainian drone struck a campus belonging to Russia’s National Guard on Sunday in the Russian region of Chechnya, continuing Kyiv’s response to a mass air attack from Moscow.
Footage on social media showed a drone swooping low over the Chechen capital, Grozny, some 800 kilometres south-east of the front line in Ukraine, before exploding. No casualties were reported.
A drone targets a base in Grozny, Russia.
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov confirmed the drone hit a site belonging to the Akhmat Grozny riot police battalion and said air defences had shot down two other drones.
Kadyrov pledged revenge on Ukrainian forces and said he had ordered a missile strike against military facilities in Kharkiv in retaliation. The claim could not be independently verified.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said on Sunday that it had shot down 15 Ukrainian drones overnight in the country’s Kursk and Belgorod regions, as well as over the Black Sea. It did not mention the Grozny attack.
An official in Ukraine’s security service also told the AP on Sunday that Ukrainian intelligence services had conducted a special operation to sever Russia’s logistic fuel supply routes from Ukraine’s annexed Crimea to occupied Zaporizhzhia.
Saturday’s operation destroyed a locomotive and 40 tanker cars, the security official said. A sabotage operation reportedly blew up railway tracks while the train was moving before HIMARS rocket launch systems joined the attack.
“As a result, a key railway branch used to supply Russian troops was put out of service for an extended period,” said the official, who asked to remain anonymous to share sensitive information.
Kyiv’s strikes on Russia over the weekend, which also set fire to a major oil terminal on Saturday, follow a mass bombardment of Ukraine by Moscow on Friday. Russia fired 93 cruise and ballistic missiles and almost 200 drones at its neighbour, battering Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.
Russia’s troops also continue their slow advance in eastern Ukraine. Washington think tank, the Institute for the Study of War, reported that geolocated footage placed Russian forces inside the settlement of Kurakhove, which Moscow’s troops had besieged for weeks after surrounding it on three sides.
The push compounds further uncertainty about how the war might unfold next year, with US President-elect Donald Trump, who takes office next month, sparking doubt as to whether vital US military support for Kyiv will continue.
In an interview in TIME magazine Thursday, Trump said that he was against allowing Ukraine to hit targets on Russian soil using US-provided weapons.
Meanwhile, Russia launched 108 drones on Ukraine from Saturday night, the Ukrainian air force said. It said 56 drones were shot down by air defences, another 49 disappeared from radar after failing to reach their targets and three more drones returned to Russia.
Governor Vitalii Kim said that two people were injured in the Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv as a result of the attack, which also damaged local infrastructure.
AP
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