The blasts went off overnight near military bases deep in Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine and Russia itself, an apparent display of Kyiv’s rapidly growing ability to wreak havoc on Moscow’s logistics away from the lines from the front
The explosions follow last week’s large blasts at a Russian airbase in Crimea. In a new assessment, a Western official said Friday that the incident had wiped out half of Russia’s Black Sea naval aviation force in one fell swoop.
Ukraine also issued a new warning about a front-line nuclear power plant where it said it believed Moscow was planning a “large-scale provocation” as justification for decoupling the plant from Ukraine’s power grid and connecting it to that of Russia
Continuing the mutual blame game, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Ukraine of bombing the Zaporizhzhia complex, risking a nuclear catastrophe.
In Crimea, which Moscow captured and annexed in 2014, explosions were reported near an air base in Belbek, on the southwest coast near Sevastopol, home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. At the opposite end of the peninsula, the sky also lit up in Kerch, near a huge bridge to Russia, with what Moscow said was fire from its anti-aircraft defenses.
Russian news agencies RIA and Tass, citing a local official in Crimea, said Russian anti-aircraft forces appeared to have been in action near the western Crimean port of Yevpatoriya on Friday night. Video posted by a Russian website showed what appeared to be a surface-to-air missile hitting a target in the air. Reuters could not immediately confirm the authenticity of the video.
Inside Russia, two villages were evacuated after explosions at an ammunition dump in Belgorod province, near the border with Ukraine but more than 100 kilometers from territory controlled by Ukrainian forces.
At least five people were killed and 10 others injured in Russian shelling of towns and villages in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region, regional authorities said. Russian shelling of the city of Kharkiv also killed at least one civilian early Friday. Russian missiles again hit port facilities and a university building in the southern port city of Mykolaiv.
Kyiv offers more strikes behind Russian lines
Closer to the front, Kyiv also announced attacks overnight behind Russian lines in southern Kherson province, including on a bridge used by Russia to supply thousands of troops on the west bank of the Dnipro River.
A Ukrainian examines the damage a missile attack caused to an engineering university building in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, on Friday. (Ammar Awad/Reuters)
“The Ukrainian armed forces gave the Russians a magical evening,” Seriy Khlan, a member of the Kherson regional council dissolved by the Russian occupation forces, wrote on Facebook.
Kyiv has been coy about its role, keeping official comment on incidents in Crimea or inside Russia, while hinting that it is behind them using long-range weapons or sabotage.
Russian officials said they had shot down drones in Belbek and Kerch and confirmed the evacuation of Belgorod.
A Western official indicated on Friday that at least some of the incidents were Ukrainian attacks, saying that Kyiv was now steadily achieving “kinetic effects” behind Russian lines. The attacks were damaging Russian forces and had “a significant psychological effect on the Russian leadership,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Russian losses at Crimean air base
The huge explosions on August 9 at Russia’s Saky air base on the Crimean coast had “put out of service more than half of the Black Sea Fleet’s naval aviation combat aircraft,” he said official, offering a new assessment of the damage from what would be one of the costliest attacks of the war.
Ukrainian soldiers are seen riding in vehicles along a road in the Donetsk region on Thursday. (Anatolii Stepanov/AFP/Getty Images)
Russia has denied that any aircraft were damaged in what it called an accident at the base, although commercial satellite images showed at least eight completely burned warplanes and several huge impact craters. Moscow fired the head of the Black Sea Fleet this week.
Ukraine hopes its apparent newfound ability to strike Russian targets behind the front lines could turn the tide of the conflict, disrupting the supply lines Moscow needs to support its occupation.
Since last month, Ukraine has launched advanced Western-supplied rockets to strike behind Russian lines. The nighttime explosions in Crimea and Belgorod go beyond the range of munitions Western countries have acknowledged sending so far.
In recent days, Kyiv has issued warnings to Russians, for whom Crimea has become a popular summer holiday destination, that no place on the peninsula is safe while it is occupied.
When the coastal air base was attacked last week, Russian tourists were photographed on nearby beaches, looking from huts at huge mushroom clouds in the sky.
A senior Ukrainian official said that about half of the incidents in Crimea were Ukrainian attacks of some kind and half were accidents caused by Russia’s bad operations. He stressed that the attacks were carried out by saboteurs rather than long-range weapons, although he did not say whether Kyiv now had ATACMS, a longer-range version of the US HIMARS rockets it began using in June .
Fears Moscow has plans for a nuclear power plant
Ukraine’s nuclear operator said on Friday it suspected Moscow was planning to disconnect the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant from Ukraine’s grid and connect it to Russia’s, a complex operation that Kyiv says could cause disaster.
A Ukrainian soldier smokes a cigarette while standing along a front line in the Zaporizhzhia region on Thursday. (Dmytro Smolienko/Reuters)
The power plant is in the hands of Russian troops on the edge of a reservoir; Ukrainian forces control the opposite bank.
Moscow has rejected international calls to demilitarize the plant, and Putin on Friday renewed his accusation that Kyiv was bombing it in a phone call with French President Emmanuel Macron, according to the Kremlin’s reading of the call.
He said Putin warned of a “danger of a large-scale catastrophe that could lead to radiation contamination of large territories.”
Kyiv denies this and says Russia is using the plant as a shield for forces to fire on Ukrainian-controlled cities. Reuters cannot independently verify the military situation at the plant.
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Macron’s office said Putin accepted an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) mission to Zaporizhzhia.
An IAEA spokesman said it was in active consultations with all parties to send its mission “as soon as possible”.