KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia and Ukraine fired more than a dozen drones into each other's territory for the second straight day on Sunday, one of which appeared to target a Russian military airport.
At least 35 Ukrainian drones were shot down overnight over three regions in southwestern Russia, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a post on the messaging app Telegram.
A Russian air base that housed bomber aircraft used in the war in Ukraine was among the targets, according to a Russian Telegram channel critical of the Kremlin. The channel published short videos of drones flying over low-rise buildings in the supposedly Russian city of Morozovsk, where the 559th Russian Bomber Aviation Regiment is stationed at the air base.
Vasily Golubev, the governor of Russia's Rostov province, separately reported “mass drone attacks” near Morozovsk and another city further west, but did not mention the air base. Golubev said most of the drones were shot down and there were no casualties. He did not comment on the damage.
Also on Sunday morning, the Ukrainian Air Force said it had shot down 20 Iranian-made Shahed drones launched by Russian troops in southern and western Ukraine overnight, as well as an X-59 cruise missile launched from the occupied south of the country was fired.
A civilian was killed overnight near Odessa, a key port on Ukraine's southern Black Sea coast, after the remains of a destroyed drone fell on his home, the Ukrainian military said.
The increased drone strikes last month come as both sides want to show they are not at an impasse as the war nears the two-year mark. Despite a Ukrainian counteroffensive that began in June, neither side has gained much ground.
According to the head of the city's military administration, Russian shelling on Sunday also killed an 81-year-old man in the center of Kherson, the southern Ukrainian city recaptured by Kiev's forces last fall.
According to Telegram posts from Governor Vasily Gladkov, an exchange of fire broke out between Ukrainian and Russian forces outside Terebreno, a Russian village just a few kilometers (miles) from the Ukrainian border. He gave no details but insisted that Russian authorities had the situation “under control.”
According to Baza, a Telegram news channel founded by Russian journalists critical of the Kremlin, fighting between Russian troops and a “Ukrainian diversionary group” began around 11 a.m. near Terebreno, where about 200 people live, forcing residents to evacuate to hide in emergency shelters.
While cross-border attacks from Ukraine into Russian territory are rare, the Russian military claimed in May to have killed more than 70 attackers they described as Ukrainian military saboteurs in a 24-hour battle. Kiev portrayed the incident as an uprising by Russian partisans against the Kremlin.
Ukraine's foreign minister, meanwhile, welcomed what he described as a fundamental change in Germany's attitude towards Kiev's EU membership bid.
In an interview with Germany's Bild newspaper, Dmytro Kuleba said that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz had won “sincere and well-deserved admiration” among Ukrainians for his role in the EU's recent decision to start accession negotiations for Kiev.
Ukraine's attempts to join the 27-member bloc have long faced stiff resistance from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has repeatedly expressed his desire to maintain close ties with Russia.
Scholz said that at an EU summit last week he suggested that Orban leave the room so that accession talks with Ukraine could begin at the summit, to which the Hungarian leader agreed.
“What Chancellor Olaf Scholz did at the summit to overturn the threatened Hungarian veto will go down in history as an act of German leadership in the interests of Europe. “The Chancellor won a lot of sincere and well-deserved admiration in the hearts of Ukrainians this week,” Kuleba told Bild.
He also expressed hope that Scholz's actions would mark a “broader and irreversible change” in Berlin's approach to EU negotiations with Kiev.
“When I fought in Berlin last May to grant Ukraine EU candidate status, my appeals to Germany to take the lead in the process largely fell on deaf ears. “Germany doesn’t want to lead,” experts and politicians told me in Berlin. I am glad that political decisions in Germany have changed since then,” said Kuleba.
The Ukrainian government has long viewed EU and NATO membership as important foreign policy goals, and the EU's decision to begin accelerated negotiations gave Kiev a major boost – although it could be years before it can join. Meanwhile, NATO leaders have not yet set a clear timetable for Kiev's bid to join, although Moscow's sweeping aggression against Ukraine in April led to another of Russia's neighbors, Finland, being accepted into the military alliance.
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the creation of military units near the Russian-Finnish border. The Kremlin chief said, without giving details, that Helsinki's entry into NATO would create “problems” for the Nordic country.
“There were no problems (between Russia and Finland). Well, there will be. Because we will create a (new) military district and concentrate certain military units there,” he said on Russian state television on Sunday morning.
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Associated Press writer Vanessa Gera in Warsaw, Poland contributed to this report.
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