KYIV (Reuters) – Ukraine carried out a drone attack on Russia’s Marinovka military airfield in the southern Russian region of Volgograd, hitting a storage site for fuel and glide bombs, a security source in Kiev said on Thursday.
The Russian governor of the Volgograd region said earlier that a fire had broken out at a military facility in the region after a Ukrainian drone crashed into it. The official, Andrei Bocharov, said there had been no injuries.
The source said the attack was part of a campaign of Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian airfields used by warplanes to conduct regular strikes against targets in Ukraine.
Aside from missile strikes, Ukraine has particularly flagged Russia’s use of cheaply produced glide bombs fired by warplanes as a threat to Ukrainian positions in the east, as well as towns and cities that have been hit by them.
Even after the delivery of a small group of US-made F-16 fighter jets, the Ukrainian Air Force is outgunned by Russia’s much larger and well-armed fleet of fighter jets.
Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The source said the drone attack was a joint operation carried out by Ukraine’s security services and the country’s special forces.
(Reporting by Tom Balmforth; Editing by Alison Williams)