(Updated with attack in Sumy, last paragraphs)
The Russian Defense Ministry announced on Saturday that Russian armed forces had taken control of the village of Nadiya in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine and shot down eight US-made ATACMS missiles.
Reuters was not immediately able to verify this information.
The Russian ministry also indicated that its air defense systems had shot down ten Ukrainian drones flying over Russian territory on Saturday morning, including three in the north of the Leningrad region.
For its part, Ukrainian air defense shot down 34 of the 81 drones launched overnight from Friday to Saturday by Russia, the Ukrainian Air Force announced on Saturday.
She added that the other 47 devices were “lost”, a reference to Ukraine’s use of electronic warfare tools to influence the trajectory of Russian drones.
The Russian aviation authority Rosaviatsia announced on Saturday through a spokesperson that the temporary restrictions imposed on flights at Pulkovo airport in Saint Petersburg had been lifted at 7:15 a.m. GMT).
-He did not specify why the flights had been suspended but Russian airports have already interrupted their activity in the past in the face of the risk of Ukrainian drone strikes, as part of the conflict which has lasted for almost three years, the Russian offensive against Ukraine having been launched in February 2022.
Recent fighting also injured three people, including two children, on Saturday during a Russian attack on the Sumy region, in northeastern Ukraine, local authorities reported.
The Sumy region, which borders the Russian region of Kursk, has been regularly bombarded for months by Moscow’s forces.
“The Russians dropped a bomb on a residential building. Two children and an adult were injured. An entrance to the building was destroyed,” reads a message from the Sumy military administration on the application Telegram.
Rescue workers went looking for people possibly trapped in the rubble, authorities added.
(Pavel Polityuk and Alexander Marrow, Gilles Guillaume and Elizabeth Pineau for the French version)
