Ukraine
Three people were killed in a night of intense shelling and airstrikes across Ukraine, officials said on Sunday, while Moscow’s second-largest airport briefly closed flights after a failed drone attack near the Russian capital. Got suspended. Oleh Sinihubov, the head of the local regional military administration, said two people were killed and four others wounded after a Russian airstrike in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said late on 5 August a guided bomb had targeted a blood transfusion centre in the region’s Kupyan district.
“This war crime alone says everything about Russian aggression,” Zelensky wrote on social media. “Defeating terrorists is a matter of honor for every person who values life.”
The city’s Moscow-appointed mayor, Alexey Kulemzin, said on Sunday that an eighty-year-old woman was also killed in Ukrainian shelling in Russian-occupied Donetsk. Moscow’s Vnukovo airport, 15 kilometres (nine miles) southwest of the Russian capital, briefly suspended flights on Sunday morning after a drone was shot down in the city’s airspace.
The Russian Defense Ministry said the drone was destroyed by air defence systems in the Podolsk region of Moscow suburbs. Ukrainian officials, who typically avoid commenting on attacks on Russian soil, did not say whether they had carried out the raid. Flights at the airport were last suspended on 30 July, when two drones crashed in a Moscow city business district after being jammed by Russian air security.
The attack was one of four attacks on the Russian capital in the space of a month, highlighting Moscow’s vulnerability as Russia’s war in Ukraine enters its second year. The attempted drone strike followed a night of heavy clashes across Ukraine. The Ukrainian Air Force reported on Sunday that Russian forces had launched 70 attack drones and air and sea missiles overnight. The bombardment reportedly included aircraft-launched cruise missiles and Iranian-made Shaheed-136/131 strike UAVs over the Caspian Sea.
Serhiy Tyurin, deputy head of the military administration of Ukraine’s Khmelnytskyi region, said on Sunday that Russian missiles had damaged several buildings in the region, injuring one and setting fire to a warehouse. In Ukraine’s eastern Kupyan region, a 55-year-old man was hospitalized after missiles struck local homes and farm buildings. Officials said on social media that the attack also started a forest fire. In the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk, Ukrainian shelling also set ablaze the main building of the M. Tugan-Baranovsky University of Economics and Trade, said Denis Pushilin, the Moscow-based head of the illegally occupied Donetsk People’s Republic. Russia’s Ministry of Emergency Situations said the fire caused the roof of the building to collapse, but there were no casualties.
