Ukrainian soldiers fire a D-30 artillery system towards Toretsk, Ukraine, on July 30, 2024.
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Ukraine's armed forces said on Saturday they attacked Russia's Morozovsk airport and a number of oil depots and fuel storage facilities in three Russian regions overnight.
The military said the attack on the airport hit an ammunition depot used by Russian forces to store guided aerial bombs and other equipment.
“Russian combat aviation must be destroyed wherever it is, by all effective means. It is also fair to strike Russian airfields. We need this joint solution with our partners – a security solution,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
The Ukrainian president has repeatedly called on his Western allies to allow them to use their weapons to launch long-range attacks on Russia, in addition to hitting military targets close to the border.
He said on Saturday that Russian forces had used more than 600 guided aerial bombs to attack Ukraine over the past week.
A Ukrainian military report said the attack on oil depots and fuel and lubricant storage facilities in the Belgorod, Kursk and Rostov regions set at least two oil tanks on fire.
In Russia, local officials reported that tanks at a fuel storage depot in the Kamensky district of the Rostov region caught fire as a result of a drone attack.
The governor of the Belgorod region also said that drones launched by Ukraine caused a fire at an oil storage depot there, adding that the fire was extinguished and no one was hurt.
Ukraine has dramatically increased its use of long-range drones this year to attack Russian oil facilities, in an effort to damage sites that feed Russian forces and the country’s economy in Moscow’s 29-month invasion.
