A drone assault on the city of Pskov in north-western Russia damaged four IL-76 military cargo aircraft, Russian authorities said early on Wednesday, engulfing two of the planes in flames.
Andriy Yusov, the deputy head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, confirmed the strike on the city on Wednesday, saying all four IL-76 military cargo planes had been destroyed and adding that “several more planes were damaged”.
Pskov is about 500 miles (800km) from Ukraine’s border, and the surrounding region borders the EU member states of Latvia and Estonia.
Russian media reported that a barrage of drones flew at the city, targeting the local airport used by civilian and military planes.
Footage and images posted on social media overnight showed smoke billowing over the city and the regional governor, Mikhail Vedernikov, ordered all flights to and from Pskov airport to be cancelled on Wednesday.
The strike on Pskov was part of a wave of reported drone attacks in the early hours of Wednesday, with the Russian defence ministry reporting that drones were also shot down over the regions of Oryol, Bryansk, Ryazan, Kaluga and Moscow.
Pskov appeared to be the only region where the drones caused damage, though media reported the sounds of explosions in some regions. Three drones were shot down in the Bryansk region, according to the Russian military, and two over the Oryol region, its governor, Andrei Klychkov, said. One was downed in the Ryazan region, one more over Kaluga, and one more in the Moscow region, officials said. No damage or casualties were registered in those regions.
The Kremlin said on Wednesday that Vladimir Putin had been informed of the overnight drone attacks. Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, said the Ukrainian drone attacks “will not go unpunished”.
Moscow and other Russian regions have been targeted by a series of Ukrainian drone attacks in recent weeks after Kyiv vowed earlier this summer to “return” the conflict to Russia.
Ministry of defence sources in Kyiv previously said the drone attacks had the dual aims of raising morale at home at a time when successes at the fronts were scarce and raising a question among the Russian public over whether Putin was able to protect them.
Meanwhile, Russia launched its own airstrike on Kyiv, which Ukrainian authorities described as the largest attack on the city since spring.
“Kyiv has not experienced such a powerful attack since spring,” Serhii Popko, the head of the Kyiv city military administration, wrote on the Telegram messaging app on Wednesday.
Ukrainian authorities said at least two people had been killed and two wounded in the attack on the Ukrainian capital on Wednesday morning.
Kyiv’s top general also said that Russia fired 28 cruise missiles at Ukraine overnight, all of which were intercepted by Ukrainian air defence.
Also on Wednesday, supporters of the mutinous Wagner head Yevgeny Prigozhin laid flowers, messages and poetry at his grave on the outskirts of St Petersburg.
Prigozhin was buried in a secret ceremony in the city on Tuesday, with his press service announcing that the event was closed to outsiders. The Kremlin denied Prigozhin a state funeral, as Moscow appeared to want to make sure not to turn his death into a large-scale public show of support for the warlord.
Pro-Kremlin media reported that Prigozhin’s wife and daughter visited the grave on Wednesday morning.
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