No direct casualties in attack that Moscow says was a Ukrainian attempt to sabotage the Russian presidential election. Ukraine launched 35 drones at targets across Russia including in the capital region, sparking a fire at an oil refinery and disrupting electricity supplies in several border areas but causing no direct casualties, the defence ministry in Moscow has said. As Russians cast their ballots in the final day of voting for the country’s presidential election, the ministry accused Kyiv of seeking to sabotage the vote after one of the biggest air operations on Russian territory since the invasion two years ago. Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, said one drone was shot down near the capital’s Domodedovo airport early on Sunday after two were downed over Kaluga, just south of the Russian capital, and four in the Yaroslavl region, northeast of Moscow. The attacks on Yaroslavl, about 500 miles (800km) from the Ukrainian border, were some of the farthest launched by Ukraine so far. More drones were downed over the Belgorod, Kursk and Rostov regions bordering Ukraine, the defence ministry said.
via guardian: Ukraine hits oil and electricity facilities with drone attacks across Russia
siehe auch: Ukraine’s Seven-Ton Strike Drones Are Back In Action. Ukraine is reaching deeper into its stocks of Cold War-vintage leftovers to find weapons—any weapons—that can strike military and industrial targets deep inside Russia. Somewhere, somehow, someone seems to have found an additional batch of 1970s-vintage Tupolev Tu-141/143 drones—crude, hulking but nevertheless potentially effective vehicles that the Ukrainians last deployed a year ago, four decades after they initially retired from Soviet service. Social-media users highlighted recent photos apparently depicting the wreckage of a Tu-143 in Russia’s Bryansk Oblast, just north of Ukraine. It seems the drone was part of Ukraine’s ongoing deep-strike campaign targeting Russian infrastructure—including oil facilities—in regions near Ukraine. As developments of the first-generation recon drones that the U.S. Air Force deployed in the Vietnam War, the jet-propelled Tu-141 and similar Tu-143 aren’t very sophisticated. But they’re simple, speedy and—at seven tons and 47 feet of length—big enough to haul a warhead weighing hundreds of pounds. That makes them much more destructive than, say, a Ukrainian clone of a 440-pound Russian Shahed drone. The Tu-141/143 works. So it should come as no surprise that the Ukrainians are sending the drones on one-way missions to, it seems, blow up Russian oil refineries.