By Frank Kamuntu
Russia thwarted an attack by 20 Ukrainian drones targeting Moscow-annexed Crimea overnight, the Russian Defense Ministry said Saturday.
Fourteen drones were shot down by Russian air defenses and a further six were jammed electronically, the ministry said in a Telegram post. No casualties or damage were reported. Kyiv officials neither confirmed nor denied Ukraine’s involvement in the attacks.
As videos circulated on Russian social media Saturday appearing to show smoke rising above a bridge linking Russia to Crimea, the annexed peninsula’s Moscow-appointed governor, Sergei Aksyonov, reported that Russian air defense had also prevented an attack there by shooting down two Ukrainian missiles.
The bridge was not damaged, he said, although traffic was briefly halted. An adviser to Aksyonov, Oleg Kryuchkov, claimed that “a smoke screen was put up by special services.”
Russia’s Foreign Ministry “strongly condemned” the attempted attack on the Crimean bridge. The ministry said in a statement that such “barbaric actions” by the Armed Forces of Ukraine “will not go unanswered.”
Shortly after reporting the downing of the two Ukrainian missiles, Aksyonov said Russian air defense had shot down another missile over the Kerch Strait.
The bridge connecting Crimea and Russia across the Kerch Strait carries heavy significance for Moscow, both logistically and psychologically, as a key artery for military and civilian supplies and as an assertion of Kremlin control of the peninsula it illegally annexed in 2014.
In the same vein, Russia attacked the western Ukrainian region of Ivano-Frankivsk with hypersonic missiles on Friday, hitting areas near a military airfield and killing an eight-year-old boy, Ukrainian officials said.
One missile crashed into the grounds of a family’s home in the Kolomyia district, wounding several people including the boy, who later died in hospital, regional governor Svitlana Onyshchuk said.
“Medics did everything possible, but unfortunately the child’s life could not be saved,” she wrote on the Telegram messaging app without clarifying how many people had been hurt.
Air defences shot down one of the four Kinzhal missiles near the capital Kyiv as they hurtled towards western Ukraine hundreds of miles from the front, the air force said.
“One X-47 (hypersonic) missile was destroyed within Kyiv region. The rest hit near the airfield. Civilian infrastructure was damaged, and one of the missiles hit a residential area,” it said on Telegram.
Air Force Colonel Yuriy Ihnat suggested the attack had been aimed at Ukrainian pilots who were about to travel to the West to train to use F-16 fighter jets that Kyiv hopes will eventually be delivered.
