Ukraine presses on; hits Russian airbase
Published on: Saturday, August 10, 2024
By: AFP
Local residents receive humanitarian aid outside Russia’s town of Sudzha and Ukrainian police said about 20,000 people need to be evacuated from 28 settlements in Sumy region.
KYIV: Ukraine pressed on with a major cross-border incursion into Russia on Friday, also launching a significant air attack on a Russian airfield hundreds of kilometres behind the front lines.
The Ukrainian offensive into Russia’s western Kursk region, launched Tuesday, appears to be the most significant attack on Russian soil since Moscow invaded in February 2022.
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Russia says around 1,000 Ukrainian troops and more than two dozen armoured vehicles and tanks were involved in the initial attack, though it has since claimed to have destroyed many more pieces of hardware.
Russia’s army said on Friday it was still fighting the incursion.
“(We) continue to repel an attempted incursion by the Ukrainian armed forces into the territory of the Russian Federation”, the defence ministry said, adding that its troops had destroyed Ukrainian military equipment and killed soldiers in several Russian settlements near the border.
Ukraine said thousands need to be evacuated from areas across the border from Russia’s Kursk region, where Moscow said Friday it was fighting off a Ukrainian incursion for a fourth day.
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Kyiv has not officially taken responsibility for the Russian incursion, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his evening address on Thursday that Russia needed to “feel” the consequences of its invasion.
Ukraine said Friday it had carried out a massive air strike on a Russian military base in the Lipetsk region, around 280 kilometres (175 miles) from the Russia-Ukraine border.
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The local Russian governor Igor Artamonov reported a “massive” drone attack overnight and Russian state news agencies said the airfield was on fire.
“Last night, the Ukrainian Defence Forces attacked the Lipetsk airfield,” Ukraine’s General Staff said in a post on Telegram.
It said it had struck “warehouses containing guided aerial bombs and a number of other facilities” and that a “massive fire broke out” with “multiple detonations.”
Artamonov cancelled several public events in the region and issued evacuation orders for districts close to the air base.
Ukrainian police said “about 20,000 people need to be evacuated” from 28 settlements in Sumy region—a sharp increase from a previous estimate of 6,000 people.
And, a Russian strike on a supermarket in the eastern Ukrainian town of Kostyantynivka on Friday killed 10 people and injured 17, the local governor said.
Ukraine’s surprise offensive into the Kursk region has appeared to catch Russia off guard, and triggered harsh criticism of the defence ministry by influential military bloggers.
Senior Kyiv officials have stayed tight-lipped over the incursion, though some, including Zelensky have appeared to justify the attack.
“Russia brought the war to our land and should feel what it has done,” Zelensky said on Thursday, without directly referring to the offensive.
“Everyone can see that the Ukraine army knows how to surprise, and knows how to achieve results,” he said in another apparent reference to the incursion without explicitly mentioning it.
But the independent US-based Institute for the Study of War said Ukraine had made significant territorial advances.
“Geolocated footage and Russian claims indicate that Ukrainian forces continued rapid advances further into Kursk Oblast on August 8 (Thursday), and Ukrainian forces are reportedly present in areas as far as 35 kilometres from the international border with Sumy Oblast” in Ukraine, the institute said in its daily campaign assessment.
It cautioned, however, that Ukrainian forces “most certainly do not control” all of that territory.
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