Sources report that a drone attack on a Russian airport near the Estonian border on Wednesday, August 30, damaged planes.
Drone attack on Russian airport: The regional governor for the area, Mikhail Vedernikov, who claimed to have been at the scene of the attack, released a video on Telegram showing a significant fire with explosions and sirens in the background.
Vedernikov said that a drone strike “has been repelled in Pskov airport,” adding that officials were evaluating the damage but there were no deaths.
Pskov is about 800 km from the Ukrainian border, and Latvia and Estonia are also neighbours in the area.
The defence ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment, although four heavy transport aircraft may have suffered damage.
Vedernikov announced that they have postponed all Wednesday flights at the airport until they clarify the nature of the potential damage to the runway.
Emergency services and the state news agency TASS have reported damage to four Ilyushin Il-76 heavy transport aircraft.
Air traffic services have shut down the airspace over Moscow’s Vnukovo airport, according to TASS.
Drones previously attacked the Pskov region in May.After Kyiv promised this summer to “return” the conflict to Russia, Moscow and other Russian territories have recently become the subject of a barrage of drone attacks from Ukraine.
BROWN SEE SHIPS
Later, Moscow claimed that its military had sunk four Ukrainian vessels in the Black Sea that were carrying up to 50 soldiers.
Around midnight Moscow time, an aircraft “destroyed four high-speed military boats,” the Russian Defence Ministry posted on Telegram.
The boats had been transporting “landing groups of Ukrainian special operations forces with a total of up to 50 people,” according to the ministry.
The actual location of the incident in the Black Sea was not specified.
Following the failure of a deal last month to assure safe navigation for grain ships in the Black Sea, both Ukraine and Russia have increased activities in the region.
Since then, Russia has repeatedly bombed Ukraine’s port facilities on the Danube River and at sea.
In its territorial seas and on the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014, Kyiv has assaulted Russian ships.
According to Moscow’s military ministry, a Russian jet allegedly destroyed a Ukrainian “reconnaissance boat” last week near Russian gas production facilities in the Black Sea.
Later, without offering any other information, it claimed to have also destroyed a US-built speedboat carrying Ukrainian troops east of Snake Island.