A Ukrainian drone attack on the Russian city of Kazan damaged residential buildings and forced the closure of the airport, local authorities said on Saturday morning.
The press service of Tatarstan’s governor, of which Kazan is the capital, Rustam Minnikhanov, said six drones struck residential buildings and one hit an industrial facility in the city over 600 miles from the front line in Ukraine.
The Associated Press verified a video shared on local Telegram news channel Astra showing a drone flying into a high-rise building and exploding.
Kazan airport suspended all flights following the attack, Russia’s civil aviation agency Rosaviatsia said.
There were no reported casualties, according to Russian state news agencies, citing local authorities. The mayor of Kazan announced via Telegram that all planned mass events in the city would be cancelled over the weekend and that authorities would offer temporary accommodation to those who have been evacuated.
The attack follows a series of Russian missile strikes on the Ukrainian capital Kyiv on Friday morning that reportedly killed at least one person and injured 11, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said.
The strikes involved five Iskander-M or North Korean KN-23 model ballistic missiles, which were all shot down, Ukraine’s air force said, but the wreckage caused considerable damage.
In the city’s Holosiivskyi district, missile wreckage damaged office and residential buildings, a gas pipe, and five cars. Several people were possibly trapped inside one office building after a started on the roof, authorities said.
A blast wave shattered the stained-glass windows of the St Nicholas Roman Catholic Cathedral in Kyiv’s Pechersk district.
Later that day, Ukraine fired US-supplied Himars missiles on the border town of Rylsk, killing six people, including a child, according to acting governor of the Kursk region Alexander Khinshtein.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky admitted that Ukraine’s armed forces do not have the strength to retake the occupied regions of Crimea and Donbas in an interview with French newspaper Le Parisien published on Tuesday.
He said: “We cannot give up our territories. The Ukrainian constitution forbids us to do so. De facto, these territories are now controlled by the Russians. We do not have the strength to recover them.
“We can only count on diplomatic pressure from the international community to force Putin to sit down at the negotiating table.”
It is estimated some 11,000 North Korean troops have been deployed to Russia’s Kursk region to seize back territory taken by Ukraine over the summer, and hundreds have recently taken part in offensive operations, insiders said.
But officials claim that a lack of training, unfamiliar terrain and poor communication with Russian officers due to the language barrier has led to them sustaining heavy injuries and losses on the battlefield.
The claims came as Defence Secretary John Healey gave a further hint that the UK could send troops to Ukraine to take part in training of soldiers.
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