Ukraine says dozens of missiles and drones shot down in overnight assault

A multi-wave overnight assault on Ukraine said to be in retaliation for successful strikes against Russian naval vessels killed four people and destroyed a blood transfusion centre even as the country’s air defences shot down 30 out of the 40 cruise missiles and tens of Shahed drones.

Oleh Syniehubov, the head of the regional military administration in the eastern Kharkiv oblast, said that along with two fatalities in his region, four people had been injured, while Volodymyr Zelenskiy condemned a “guided air bomb” strike against a medical facility as a war crime of “beasts”.

“In total, in several waves of attacks, from the evening of Aug 5 to the morning of Aug 6 2023, the enemy used 70 means of air assault weapons,” Kyiv’s air force said via the Telegram messaging channel. “Information about Kinzhals is classified.”

Reuters reported that it was unclear what had happened to the 10 cruise missiles that were not shot down.

The Moscow-appointed mayor of Russian-occupied Donetsk in the east, Alexei Kulemzin, said a woman in her 80s had died amid Ukrainian shelling of the city in east Ukraine.

On one of the busiest nights of strikes for weeks, Ukraine’s president reported multiple dead and wounded following an atttack on a blood transfusion centre in Kupiansk, a city in Kharkiv. Officials in Kyiv said at least four people in total had been killed overnight, and that information was still coming in.

“This war crime alone says everything about Russian aggression,” Zelenskiy tweeted. “Beasts that destroy everything that simply allows life. Defeating terrorists is a matter of honour for everyone who values life.”

Images of Zelenskiy signing a Storm shadow missile were later released by Ukraine’s government as it emerged that the Anglo-French weaponry had been used to hit two important bridges connecting Crimea to occupied areas of Ukraine on Sunday.

Zelenskiy said Russian missiles had also hit a factory belonging to Motor Sich, which makes plane and helicopter engines and other components.

It is one of several companies requisitioned by the Ukrainian government since Moscow’s invasion. The site is near Khmelnytskyi in western Ukraine, about 300km (190 miles) south-west of Kyiv.

The region, home to a major Ukrainian airbase, has been regularly targeted by Russian strikes in recent months.

On Saturday, the former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev had suggested that Moscow would have its revenge after the use of naval drones to disable a Russian landing ship and an oil tanker over the previous 48 hours.

Russia said on Sunday that its forces had struck military airbases in the Khmelnytskyi and Rivne regions in western Ukraine and that “all targets were hit”.

“Overnight Russia’s armed forces carried out strikes … on Ukrainian armed forces airbases around the settlements of Starokostiantyniv in the Khmelnytskyi region and Dubno in the Rivne region,” the Russian defence ministry said.

In his address on Saturday evening, Zelenskiy remained defiant, saying: “No matter how many such Russian attacks there are, they will still do nothing for the enemy.”

Serhiy Tyurin, the deputy head of Ukraine’s Khmelnytsky region military administration, said Russian missiles had damaged several buildings in the area, injuring a worker at a grain silo and sparking a fire in a warehouse, according to Agence France-Presse.

Russia had previously targeted the Starokostiantyniv military airfield in Khmelnytskyi at the end of July.

The Moscow mayor, Sergey Sobyanin, said on Sunday that a hostile drone had been destroyed by air forces as it approached the city.

“Today at around 11am a drone attempted to make a breakthrough toward Moscow,” he wrote on Telegram. “It was destroyed while approaching by air defence forces.”

The Russian defence ministry said the Ukrainian drone had been destroyed over the Podolsky district in the Moscow region. “There were no casualties or damage,” the ministry said.

Temporary restrictions that had been introduced at Moscow’s Vnukovo international airport were lifted, the Russian-state run news agency RIA Novosti said.

Russia accused Ukraine of two drone attacks on its capital last week. A skyscraper in Moscow had been attacked twice in two days over the past week, according to Sobyanin. Several drones had been shot down but “one flew into the same tower at the Moskva City complex” that was targeted last Sunday.

On Saturday, a Russian oil tanker in the Kerch strait off occupied Crimea became the latest high-profile target to be struck by a Ukrainian naval drone, as Kyiv’s maritime agency warned that all Russian ports should be considered a “war risk area”.

The early Saturday morning attack on a vessel identified as the Sig was the second such naval attack in a 24-hour period, after the scuppering of a Russian landing ship on Friday outside the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk.

The vessel had to be rescued by two tugboats after it lost power, Russia’s state-run Tass news agency reported, but it was claimed there had been no serious injuries and no fuel had been released into the sea.