Aug 22 (Reuters) – Ukrainian drones killed at least 10 people in attacks against targets across Russia and Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, including a warehouse owned by online retailer Ozon and an industrial facility, Russian officials said on Saturday.
Russia and Ukraine are both ramping up drone campaigns aiming to cripple each other’s economic infrastructure, often striking targets far beyond the war’s front lines, as fighting on the battlefield grinds toward the 4-1/2-year mark.
On Friday, at least 16 people were killed and more than 130 wounded when several Russian drones struck a shopping centre in central Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Saturday that Ukraine’s strikes, which Kyiv says seek to choke off financing for Moscow’s war effort, had opened a “Pandora’s box” of Russian retaliation.
French President Emmanuel Macron, meanwhile, promised to accelerate the delivery of new French equipment to Ukraine, after discussing Kyiv’s shortage of air defences in a call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
DRONE STRIKES ACROSS RUSSIA AND RUSSIAN-HELD UKRAINE
In a post on Telegram on Saturday, Vyacheslav Fedorishchev, governor of Russia’s Samara region, said that an elderly woman had been killed in a strike on the city of Novokuibyshevsk, which he said caused damage to industrial facilities. Ukraine’s military said it had struck the city’s oil refinery, causing a fire.
Ozon, Russia’s second-largest online retailer, said in a statement on Telegram that work at its Samara region logistics centre in the town of Chapayevsk had been halted after the strike, which it said caused injuries.
The attack is the first on Ozon following weeks of drone strikes on its larger rival Wildberries, which Ukraine has cast as part of a wider campaign against economic infrastructure underpinning the Russian war in Ukraine.
Elsewhere, in the southern Russian region of Krasnodar, Governor Veniamin Kondratyev said that three people, two of them children, had been killed and another adult was wounded in a strike on the Sea of Azov port town of Yeysk. He said a fire had broken out at an unnamed facility at the town’s port.
The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, said two people had been killed and 13 wounded in Ukrainian attacks. In Bryansk, another frontier region, four people were wounded, the local governor said.
On the Crimean peninsula, seized from Ukraine by Russia in 2014, the Moscow-backed governor of Sevastopol, Mikhail Razvozhayev, said that at least two people had been killed and 10 injured when a Ukrainian drone struck a city bus.
In Luhansk region, an eastern Ukrainian province almost all of which is controlled by Russia, Moscow-installed governor Leonid Pasechnik said that two civilians, including a 16-year-old boy, had been killed and nine more were wounded.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said it downed a total of 457 Ukrainian drones overnight.
(Reporting by Felix Light;Editing by Alexandra Hudson, Emelia Sithole-Matarise and Joe Bavier)
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