Ukrainian drones strike Russian airfield as Kyiv pursues incursion

Ukrainian drones struck a military airfield in Russia’s Lipetsk region and detonated large amounts of ammunition, while Moscow declared a state of emergency in two regions in the face of Kyiv’s most ambitious counter-incursion.

The offensive, which raged into a fourth day on Friday, is the largest attack by Kyiv’s forces on Russian soil since President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It aims to divert Russia’s troops and expose its weaknesses, said an adviser to the government in Kyiv.

As Kyiv pursued its incursion, a Russian attack on a busy supermarket and post office in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kostyantynivka on Friday killed at least 11 civilians and injured 37 more, said President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and local authorities.

Officials published videos showing black smoke billowing from a destroyed store and first responders working to save shoppers trapped under debris. Another video showed badly wounded people sprawled on the pavement.

The overnight drone attack on Russia was carried out by Ukraine’s security service, the SBU, with the military and special forces early Friday, a Ukrainian official with knowledge of operations inside Russia told the Financial Times.

The official said the Lipetsk air base — about 300km from the international border and just east of the latest fighting — was targeted “to destroy Russian aviation logistics so that the enemy does not have the opportunity to bomb Ukrainian cities with anti-aircraft missiles”.

Several warehouses filled with ammunition were detonated, the official said. Videos published on social media and geolocated by the Financial Times showed massive explosions reaching into the night sky.

The Ukrainian official claimed that up to 700 glide bombs stored in the warehouses were damaged or destroyed. Several dozen fighter jets, including Su-34, Su-35 and MiG-31 aircraft, along with military helicopters, were also at the air base, said the general staff of Ukraine’s army.

“Most of the planes stationed at the military airfield . . . did not have time to take off,” the Ukrainian official claimed. 

The FT could not immediately verify whether the bombs and aircraft had been damaged or destroyed. Russian military bloggers reported that no aircraft were damaged.

Lipetsk authorities imposed a state of emergency and ordered the evacuation of residents in nearby towns. Videos shared on Russian Telegram channels showed lines of civilian vehicles stretching several kilometres fleeing east from the area.

The Ukrainian official said the Lipetsk attack was a follow-up to an assault on the Morozovsk military base in Russia’s Rostov region on Monday that had destroyed anti-aircraft missiles and jet fighters. 

Ukraine’s general staff said its forces had also attacked Russian anti-aircraft missile divisions in the occupied territory of the eastern Donetsk region.

Those attacks came as Ukrainian forces pressed forward with their assault in the neighbouring Kursk region, where the Kremlin has lost control of roughly 350 sq km of territory, according to calculations by the FT and military analysts. 

Alexei Smirnov, the Kursk region’s acting governor, said the situation remained “difficult”. He said his government had declared a state of emergency, was still evacuating residents and was assisting those displaced.

Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters in Washington on Thursday that Ukraine was “taking action to protect themselves” and that the Biden administration did not see the incursion as escalatory.

Video and photo evidence suggested that Ukraine’s army has moved as deep as 35km into Russia from the international border, down a highway heading north-west. 

A video circulating on social media that the FT geolocated to a highway in Rylsk showed a destroyed column of Russian military vehicles transporting soldiers that stretched for hundreds of metres. The bodies of several troops are seen in the gruesome video.

A person with knowledge of the operation shared a video with the FT purporting to show a first-person-view (FPV) camera-equipped drone armed with an explosive as it crashed into the tail rotor of a Russian military helicopter.

The person said the SBU was behind the strike — the second Ukrainian FPV drone attack on a Russian helicopter this week. The person said both helicopters crashed as a result of the strikes, but the FT was unable to independently corroborate the claims.

Zelenskyy has not explicitly commented on the incursion, but thanked Ukrainian troops on Friday for “destroying the Russian occupiers, holding the frontline, and ensuring that Ukraine remains on the world map”.

“We are doing our best to provide our warriors with as many opportunities as possible to end this war as soon as possible with a just and lasting peace,” he said.

Elements of at least four Ukrainian mechanised and airborne brigades have taken part in the operation so far.

Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defence minister who advises the government, told the FT that Kyiv planned the operation long in advance.

Its aims include diverting Russian troops fighting elsewhere in Ukraine, as well as bringing the war home to Russians and discouraging them from supporting the war effort.

It also aims to expose Russia’s weaknesses, including that it is incapable of protecting its own border, and to try to seize the initiative on the battlefield a year after an unsuccessful counteroffensive, and following months of Russian gains.

⁠Zagorodnyuk said the Ukrainian military was proving its ability to conduct “new tactics of combined arms operation” taught by western military trainers.

He said the aim was not to capture and hold Russian territory “for long”. “We don’t need Russian land,” he said. “We want them to fail on ours.”

Konrad Muzyka, a military analyst at Rochan Consulting, a Poland-based security group, said the Ukrainian operation could help its position in the war if it forces Russia to divert resources from the eastern Donetsk region and allows Kyiv to maintain a presence in Russia’s Kursk region.

That presence may offer a better negotiating position in future, he said.

“If Ukrainian troops, however, are pushed back from the Russian territory without any tangible results with high losses and if Russians continue moving towards Pokrovsk,” he said, then Ukraine’s top military leadership will be seen as having lost a massive gamble.

“There is no middle ground here. The operation is daring,” he said.

Additional reporting by Max Seddon in Riga and Anastasia Stognei in Tbilisi