(Kyiv) Ukrainian drones targeted a military airfield and an oil depot in Russia, a Ukrainian military source said on Saturday, after Russia announced it had shot down 76 drones.
Kyiv says it is carrying out these strikes in response to Russian bombings that have been plaguing Ukraine for more than two years and are primarily targeting military and industrial targets.
“Last night, drones of the Ukrainian security service visited the Morozovsk airfield in the Rostov region,” where aircraft and guided aerial bombs are stored, the Ukrainian source said, adding that “Ukrainian drones did a great job hitting the aerial munitions depot.”
Russia has launched more than 600 guided aerial bombs on Ukraine in just one week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has claimed.
“Russian warplanes must be destroyed wherever they are, by all effective means. Striking Russian airfields is also quite fair,” he wrote on social media.
Russian authorities have not responded to allegations of the destroyed airfield, but local governor Vasily Golubev said on Telegram that authorities had declared a state of emergency in the Morozovsk district.
“At present we have recorded damage to the windows [de plusieurs bâtiments]including schools and kindergartens, as well as on houses and industrial premises,” he wrote.
According to the Ukrainian source, an oil depot was also hit in the Kamenskiy district of the Rostov region, where Russian authorities earlier said depots had been hit by a drone attack.
More than 90 firefighters and 33 vehicles were dispatched to the scene to control the fire, local administration head Vladimir Savin said on Telegram.
Russia, which announces almost daily that it has destroyed Ukrainian drones launched against its territory, said on Saturday that it had shot down 76 devices during the night and morning.
The majority of these drones were “intercepted and destroyed” in the Rostov-on-Don region, which hosts the headquarters of the Russian operation in Ukraine, the Kursk and Belgorod regions, which border Ukraine, as well as in the Oriol region, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement.
In the Belgorod region, the drone attack targeted an oil depot in the Gubkin district, causing a fire there that was quickly extinguished, according to regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov.
On Saturday, the Ukrainian army also announced that it had shot down 24 Russian drones during the night, particularly in the regions of Kherson, Odessa, Mykolaiv, Poltava, Dnipropetrovsk and Kyiv.