Ukraine struck a military air base deep inside Russia over the weekend thought to house several types of Russian jets, Kyiv’s military said, in the latest strike designed to hamper Moscow’s air force, a critical part of its war effort.
Ukraine struck the “the infrastructure of the Lipetsk-2 military airport,” which is home to Russian Su-34, Su-35 and MiG-31 jets, Kyiv’s General Staff said in a statement on Sunday. Its forces had homed in on warehouses storing ammunition, fuel and aviation equipment, the Ukrainian military added. The extent of the damage is not clear. Newsweek has reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry for comment via email.
Ukraine has consistently targeted Russian military airfields and air bases across the border with long-range drones, although it is not allowed to use Western-provided long-range missiles to strike inside Russian territory. Kyiv has loudly appealed against this restriction, but the ban remains in place, despite signals from Western officials earlier this fall.
Moscow said early on Sunday that it had “destroyed” 110 Ukrainian drones over various regions overnight, including 27 uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) over the Lipetsk region.
Testing of the braking of the aircraft at the V.P. Chkalov state center for training aviation personnel and military tests of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation in Lipetsk, Russia. Ukraine struck the “the infrastructure of the Lipetsk-2 military airport.”
Nina Padalko / Sputnik via AP
Lipetsk regional governor, Igor Artamonov, said in a post to messaging app Telegram that debris from intercepted drones had landed west of the city of Lipetsk, but that there were “no casualties or damage.”
“The fires that broke out on the ground after the UAV crash were quickly extinguished,” Artamonov said in a later update.
The Lipetsk-2 air base lies just northwest of the city of Lipetsk, and north of the area named by the regional governor.
At the start of October, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) targeted the Borisoglebsk airfield in Russia’s border Voronezh region, a Ukrainian security source told Newsweek at the time.
The SBU, along with other branches of Ukraine’s military, attacked warehouses where Russia stored KAB precision-guided aerial bombs, the source said. Kyiv also targeted Su-34 and Su-35 fighter jets and aviation fuel storage sites at the airfield, the source added.
Ukraine previously attacked the Lipetsk air base in early August. Artamonov described a “massive UAV attack” at the time.
A Ukrainian source also said on Sunday that Kyiv had struck the Sverdlov explosives, chemical and ammunition plant in the Russian city of Dzerzhinsk overnight, close to the regional capital in the Nizhny Novgorod region.
The source described the Sverdlov plant, which is under sanctions leveled by the U.S. and the European Union, as Russia’s “largest explosives factory.”
Nizhny Novgorod Regional Governor Gleb Nikitin said on Sunday that air defenses and electronic warfare systems had repelled a drone attack around the “industrial zone” in Dzerzhinsk. He did not specify the target of the attack, but said four people had sustained minor injuries.
The Sverdlov plant is around 900 kilometers, or around 560 miles, from the Ukrainian border, the source said.
