Ukraine Drones Strike Russian Airfield Hosting Su-35 Combat Jets

Ukraine struck a military air base deep inside Russia over the weekend thought to house several types of Russian jets, Kyiv’s military said, in the latest strike designed to hamper Moscow’s air force, a critical part of its war effort.

Ukraine struck the “the infrastructure of the Lipetsk-2 military airport,” which is home to Russian Su-34, Su-35 and MiG-31 jets, Kyiv’s General Staff said in a statement on Sunday. Its forces had homed in on warehouses storing ammunition, fuel and aviation equipment, the Ukrainian military added. The extent of the damage is not clear. Newsweek has reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry for comment via email.

Ukraine has consistently targeted Russian military airfields and air bases across the border with long-range drones, although it is not allowed to use Western-provided long-range missiles to strike inside Russian territory. Kyiv has loudly appealed against this restriction, but the ban remains in place, despite signals from Western officials earlier this fall.

Moscow said early on Sunday that it had “destroyed” 110 Ukrainian drones over various regions overnight, including 27 uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) over the Lipetsk region.

Lipetsk regional governor, Igor Artamonov, said in a post to messaging app Telegram that debris from intercepted drones had landed west of the city of Lipetsk, but that there were “no casualties or damage.”

“The fires that broke out on the ground after the UAV crash were quickly extinguished,” Artamonov said in a later update.

The Lipetsk-2 air base lies just northwest of the city of Lipetsk, and north of the area named by the regional governor.

At the start of October, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) targeted the Borisoglebsk airfield in Russia’s border Voronezh region, a Ukrainian security source told Newsweek at the time.

The SBU, along with other branches of Ukraine’s military, attacked warehouses where Russia stored KAB precision-guided aerial bombs, the source…