Ukrainian drone attack sets Russian ammunition depot on fire

By Natasha Anderson

10:19 07 July 2024, updated 10:23 07 July 2024

As it became known, Ukraine launched a drone attack overnight that set fire to a Russian ammunition depot near the border region of Voronezh.

A state of emergency was declared in parts of the Russian city of Voronezh after the attack sparked a warehouse fire, local authorities said.

The region’s governor, Alexander Gusev, said on Sunday that Moscow’s air defense systems had “detected and destroyed several drones,” adding that local residents had been “evacuated.”

Russia and Ukraine have made extensive use of drones, including large explosive devices with a range of hundreds of kilometers, since the start of the Russian military operation in February 2022.

Ukraine has stepped up its attacks on Russian territory this year, targeting both energy facilities it says supply the Russian army and towns and villages just across the border.

“Several drones were detected and destroyed by air defense systems over the Voronezh region overnight,” regional governor Alexander Gusev wrote in a Telegram message on Sunday.

“Their falling debris sparked a fire in a depot in Podgorenski district, where “explosives began to detonate.”

Rescue teams were on the scene and Gusev said some residents of the region’s Podgorensky district were being evacuated.

He added: “There were no casualties.”

Ukraine has stepped up its retaliatory strikes against Putin’s army, causing a fire in Krasnodar, Russia, on Saturday night after carrying out a drone attack on an oil depot.

Authorities in Krasnodar province, near Russia-annexed Crimea, reported on Saturday that several oil depots were on fire in the Pavlovsk and Leningrad districts of the southern Russian region.

Debris from a drone strike sparked a fire at an oil depot, set fuel tanks ablaze elsewhere and damaged a cell phone tower, the reports said. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

Firefighters extinguished a fire at an oil depot in Pavlovsky district on Saturday. On Sunday, local authorities announced on Telegram that the fire in Leningradsky had also been extinguished.

The Russian military also claimed on Saturday that its air defense units shot down seven Ukrainian drones each in the southern regions of Belgorod and Kursk on the Ukrainian border on Saturday.

The Russian Defense Ministry said seven drones were intercepted over the Belgorod region, which is subjected to almost daily Ukrainian attacks.

Alexei Smirnov, governor of the Kursk region further north and west, also reported that seven drones had been shot down over his region.

He said Ukrainian forces had shelled about ten villages during the day.

Meanwhile, Russian Iskander ballistic missiles destroyed two launch pads for Patriot surface-to-air missile systems in Ukraine’s Odessa region, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Sunday.

The attack took place near the port of Yuzhne, the ministry said in a statement via the messaging app Telegram. A radar station was also destroyed.

It is not clear when the attack on the Patriot missile launchers took place. A video posted by the ministry on Telegram shows explosions in daylight on uninhabited land near the coast after zooming in on difficult-to-identify objects.

Reuters could not independently verify the Russian report. There was no immediate comment from Ukraine.

Earlier on Sunday, the Ukrainian Air Force said Russia had attacked Ukraine with two Iskander ballistic missiles, but no further details were given.

Earlier, on Friday night, more than 100,000 households in northern Ukraine were left without electricity and the water supply to a regional capital was cut off as a result of Russian attacks, Ukrainian authorities announced on Saturday. In the embattled east of the country, the number of civilian casualties has risen sharply.

The northern region of Sumy on the border with Russia was plunged into darkness after Russian attacks damaged energy infrastructure late Friday, the Ukrainian Energy Ministry said.

A few hours later, Ukrainian public broadcaster reported that Russian drones had attacked the provincial capital of Sumy and cut off the power lines that supply the country’s pumping system.

Russian state news agency RIA quoted a local pro-Kremlin underground leader as saying that Moscow forces had overnight attacked a factory producing rocket ammunition in the city, whose pre-war population was over 256,000.

The report did not specify which weapon was used, and the claim could not be independently verified. According to Ukrainian media reports, explosions occurred in the city during an air raid alert early Saturday morning.

Russia is continuously attacking Ukraine’s badly damaged energy infrastructure, causing hours-long power outages across the country. Ukrainian officials warn that the situation could worsen as winter approaches.

In the eastern Donetsk region, 11 civilians were killed and 43 injured by Russian artillery fire on Friday and overnight, local governor Vadym Filashkin reported on Saturday.

Five people were killed in the town of Selydove, southeast of Pokrovsk, a city in the east that has become a focal point on the front lines.

The Ukrainian General Staff said on Saturday morning that there had been 45 clashes between Ukrainian and Russian forces near Pokrovsk in recent days.

Hours later, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that its troops had captured a village about 30 kilometers east of the city.

According to Filashkin, three other civilians died in Chasiv Yar, the strategically located town in Donetsk that was reduced to rubble by a months-long Russian attack.

For months, Russian forces have been trying to gain a foothold in Ukraine’s industrial east in what appears to be an attempt to draw the country’s defenders into a war of attrition after Kyiv’s forces thwarted a cross-border advance further north that briefly threatened Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city.

A Ukrainian military spokesman said on Thursday that Ukrainian forces had withdrawn from a neighborhood on the outskirts of Chasiv Yar.

Due to its elevated position, the city is of strategic importance. Military analysts believe that if this city were to fall, it would also endanger the surrounding cities.

In addition, it could endanger important Ukrainian supply routes and bring Russia one step closer to its stated goal of capturing the entire Donetsk region.

According to the Ukrainian General Staff, Russian forces launched six missile strikes and 55 airstrikes on Ukraine on Friday and overnight, and used more than 70 glide bombs – converted Soviet-era weapons that have wreaked havoc in the country in recent weeks.