Ukraine war latest: Russian military airbase ablaze after Kyiv drone attack

Ukraine’s border guard service said on Thursday that Kyiv had seen no signs of Belarusian troop or military hardware movements near their shared border since Minsk announced it was sending additional forces to the area.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said on Sunday the country had deployed nearly a third of its armed forces along the border, claiming that Kyiv had stationed more than 120,000 troops there.

“We do not see any movement directly near our border – neither equipment nor personnel,” Andriy Demchenko, Ukraine’s border guard service spokesman, told national television.

He added that the situation near the Belarus border “generally has not changed”.

Russia has opened a criminal case against a British journalist for allegedly illegally crossing the Ukrainian-Russian border into Kursk.

The FSB named the journalist as Nick Paton Walsh, a British citizen who works as CNN’s Chief International Security Correspondent.

In the CNN broadcast, journalists travelled with a Ukrainian military convoy from Ukraine to Sudzha, where they encountered a nearly deserted town with a few dozen elderly residents remaining.

The FSB said in a statement that Moscow would soon issue an international arrest warrant related to the three journalists’ cases.

The maximum punishment for anyone found guilty of illegally crossing the border is five years in jail, it said.

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky said on Thursday he and his army chief had visited the border region of Sumy near the border with Russia, two weeks after Kyiv’s incursion into the Kursk region.

Zelensky said Ukrainian troops had taken control of one more village in the Kursk region. Ukrainian officials have previously said Kyiv controls more than 90 settlements there.

Ukrainian forces are advancing through Russia’s Kursk region as part of their historic cross-border assault, concentrating their resources on this attack but Moscow’s forces are doing the same in eastern Ukraine.

President Volodymyr Zelensky admitted this week the situation on Ukraine’s eastern frontline was “difficult”. Ukraine’s general staff, meanwhile, reported that there had been dozens of combat clashes on several hot points of the frontline in that direction.

As reports surface that Ukraine may have shifted some military resources from the eastern Donetsk region, the site of the most intense fighting in Ukraine, to help prosecute their Kursk incursion, concerns abound that such a move could prove a fatal miscalculation.

The US embassy in Kyiv said there was a heightened risk of Russian missile and drone attacks throughout Ukraine in the coming days as the country prepares to mark 33 years since its independence from the Soviet Union on Saturday.

Ukraine’s top commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said earlier this week that Russia had launched 9,600 missiles and 14,000 drones during strikes on Ukraine since it launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

“The US Embassy in Kyiv assesses that during the next several days and through the weekend there is an increased risk of Russian drone and missile attacks throughout Ukraine in connection with Ukraine’s Independence Day on 24 August,” it said.

A Russian military airbase was left ablaze after Ukraine launched a massive drone barrage over Russia in the early hours of Thursday morning.

The Marinovka airfield in Volgograd was attacked at around 3.30am on Thursday, with Moscow claiming it shot down a drone with a fire started by falling debris.

Up to 28 drones were launched across Russia by Ukraine in the attack, according to the Russian defence ministry.

“Most of the drones were destroyed. As a result of the UAV crash, a fire broke out on the territory of a defense ministry facility,” Andrei Bocharov, the region’s governor, said.