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In this photo from a video posted via the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations’ telegram channel on Saturday, firefighters put out burning cars after shelling in Belgorod, Russia. Russian air defenses have shot down dozens of Ukrainian drones occupying Crimea and southern Russia, officials said today. .
Russian air defenses shot down dozens of Ukrainian drones in occupied Crimea and southern Russia today, officials said, as Kyiv continued its strategy of attacking the Moscow-annexed peninsula and waging war against Russia. 22 months beyond Ukraine’s borders.
Air raid sirens sounded in Sevastopol, Crimea’s largest city, and traffic was suspended for a second straight day on a bridge linking the peninsula, which Moscow illegally seized a decade ago, with Russia’s southern Krasnodar region. Russia’s war effort.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said its defenses intercepted 36 drones over Crimea and one over Krasnodar, in a new trend of intensifying Ukrainian airstrikes in recent days.
A Ukrainian Neptune anti-ship missile was also destroyed over the northwestern part of the Black Sea, the ministry said.
The advances come after three more people were wounded on Thursday night due to more Ukrainian rocket and drone attacks on the Russian border town of Belgorod and the surrounding region, Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said.
He posted photographs on Telegram of a construction site with broken windows and cars. He said the government may be the one that needs to move away from the border.
The Dec. 30 Ukrainian attacks in Belgorod killed 25 people, he said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has vowed to hit more targets in Russia’s Crimean peninsula and internal border regions this year. The goal is to destabilize Russians as President Vladimir Putin seeks six years in power in the March 17 election.
A Ukrainian attack on military facilities in Crimea hit a command center and the peninsula’s air defense system on Thursday, according to Nataliia Humeniuk, spokeswoman for Ukraine’s southern joint forces.
He said the Russian military had moved its Shahed drone launch sites to Crimea.
It was not conceivable to determine the claims of either party.
Following a drone strike in central Russia last year, Zelenskyy said Ukraine had developed a weapon capable of hitting targets 400 miles away. Last month he said Kyiv planned to produce 1 million drones, which have a key weapon on the battlefield.
Other Ukrainian officials said the purpose was to manufacture more than 10,000 attack drones with a diversity of several hundred kilometers this year, as well as more than 1,000 drones of greater diversity, capable of hitting targets on the front line and inside Russia.
Both sides raise the stakes in their long-range warfare while infantrymen remain stuck on the winter battlefield. Britain’s Ministry of Defense said “ground fighting continued to be characterized by a static front line or very slow local Russian advances in key sectors. “”.
The Kremlin, meanwhile, has acquired ballistic missiles from North Korea and fired at least one of them into Ukraine on Dec. 30, the White House said Thursday, citing recently declassified U.S. intelligence. It also is seeking close-range ballistic missiles from Iran, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said.
British Defense Secretary Grant Shapps said Pyongyang would pay a heavy price for its services to Russia, though he did not specify how, and accused Moscow of violating the U. N. embargo on arms shipments to and from North Korea.
“The world has turned its back on Russia, forcing Putin into the humiliation of turning to North Korea to continue his illegal invasion,” Shapps said on X, formerly Twitter.
Asked about the development, Ukrainian air force spokesman Yurii Ihnat said in televised comments today that he couldn’t immediately confirm the use of the North Korean-supplied missiles, adding that experts need to study the fragments. Russian officials have refrained from commenting on previous U.S. claims that North Korea has supplied ammunition to Moscow.
Ukraine said it had stopped 21 of the 29 Russian Shahed drones introduced on Thursday and earlier in the day. The attack wounded two people, plus a 14-year-old boy, and is the latest in a series of near-daily Russian drone strikes in the new year.
Zelensky on Thursday night thanked Germany for the delivery of military aid, especially air defense equipment, which he said “is timely and corresponds to our priorities. “
Ukraine “should seek to further degrade Russia’s ability to wage war by conducting an escalating crusade of airstrikes against targets far removed from the front lines of occupied Ukraine and inside Russia itself,” according to Mykola Bielieskov, a researcher at Ukraine’s National Institute for Strategic Studies. .
“This could include attacks on troop concentrations, military bases, and munitions stores along with logistical hubs and armament production facilities,” he wrote in an assessment published by the Atlantic Council, a U.S. think tank.
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