- The Russian defence ministry said it brought down three Ukrainian drones over the capital, Moscow, damaging a high-rise building reported to house government offices. Nobody was hurt and the attack briefly forced the closure of the city’s four airports.
- Ukraine did not directly claim responsibility for the drone attacks but President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the war was “gradually returning to Russia’s territory – to its symbolic centres”.
- Separately, the Russian defence ministry said it had successfully thwarted an overnight attack on the annexed Black Sea peninsula of Crimea by 25 Ukrainian drones. Nobody was hurt and no damage was caused, it said.
- Ukrainian officials said there was heavy fighting in the northeastern parts of the country, with Ukrainian forces holding their lines and making gains in some areas.
- Zelenskyy described Sunday as a “good day, a powerful day” at the front, particularly near Bakhmut, where Ukrainian forces say they are retaking ground lost when Russian forces took the city in May.
- In the northeastern Kharkiv region, a Russian attack set off a fire at a “non-residential” building but caused no casualties, officials said. And in the northern city of Sumy, the death toll from a Russian attack on a school on Saturday rose to two after rescue teams cleared rubble from the area.
- Ukrainian Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar said Russian forces were “trying to drive us out” of elevated positions in the northeast, occupied by Moscow after its full-scale invasion, but retaken later by Ukrainian troops. The Russians’ key task, she told national television, was to “divert our forces from the Bakhmut area, where we have a successful offensive. They have attacked endlessly this week. But our troops resist the attacks and sometimes push them back with heavy losses.”
- Maliar said Russian forces were also “tenaciously trying to seize back” areas on the southern front retaken taken by Ukraine. Ukraine, she said, had recaptured 200 square kilometres (77 square miles) in the south but advances were limited by entrenched Russian positions and mines.
- Zelenskyy, meanwhile, warned of more Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy system once cold weather returns later this year and pledged to do everything possible to protect the power grid.
- Russia’s defence ministry, in its daily account of military activity, said its forces had spotted and deployed rockets to destroy an аrmoured brigade of Ukrainian troops near Svatove, a key Russian-held town in Ukraine’s northeast.
- Russian forces, it added, had also repelled four Ukrainian attacks near the town of Lyman, further south.
- The United Kingdom’s defence ministry said thousands of troops from Russia’s Wagner Group were now stationed in central Belarus and that most vehicles accompanying the soldiers were not armoured combat vehicles but minibuses and trucks.
Source : Aljazeera