Airborne warnings went off across Ukraine on Wednesday. According to Ukrainian news agency Interfax, explosions are reported in the southern and eastern regions of the country. A hospital was reportedly hit in the Zaporizhia region overnight. A child is said to have died. There were also rocket launches in neighboring Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions. In Donetsk there was one dead and eight wounded.
“Grief floods our hearts – a just-born child has been killed,” Zaporizhia’s military governor Olexandr Starukh wrote in Telegram on Wednesday. Rescuers are on duty in the small town of Wilnjansk. There were no casualties in the Dnipropetrovsk region. However, more than 30 shells hit the cities, said military governor Valentyn Resnichenko.
Meanwhile, Russia may soon need supplies of Iranian weapons. The British Ministry of Defense announced in its daily intelligence report on Twitter that the quota was almost exhausted.
iranian drones
Russia is increasingly relying on Iranian drones in the war against Ukraine. With that, Russia wants to make up for its lack of cruise missiles, London said on Wednesday, citing intelligence findings. Since September, Russian troops have used hundreds of missiles against Ukraine, including so-called kamikaze drones. “But the approach has had limited success,” he said. Most of the drones were knocked out by Ukrainian air defense.
The British ministry said the main targets of the drone strikes were tactical military objects and the Ukrainian power grid. More recently, however, Russian commanders have demanded that Iranian drones target medical facilities and attack them with guided missiles.
No more kamikaze drone strikes were reported for a few days, it said in London. “Russia has probably almost exhausted its current stockpile, but will likely try to restock.” It is probably easier for Russia to acquire new drones from abroad than to produce new cruise missiles, the ministry said.