KYIV, Ukraine – Russia said on Sunday its forces had advanced in eastern Ukraine as Kyiv reported deadly air attacks and called on the West to let it strike back deep inside Russia.
Russian attack drones flying towards Ukraine also breached the airspace of Nato members Romania and Latvia, the countries said Sunday, triggering calls for a robust response from the military alliance.
In recent weeks, Moscow has escalated its airstrikes. Still, it is also trying to fend off a severe Ukrainian cross-border offensive into its western Kursk region, which has redrawn the contours of the two-and-a-half-year war.
Kyiv launched its Kursk offensive on August 6, hoping to force Russia into redeploying troops pressing forward in the country’s east. But Moscow has appeared to intensify its attacks there, chalking up its most significant territorial gains in almost two years over August.
On Sunday, Russia’s military claimed to have captured yet another tiny village in the eastern Donetsk region, en route to the key logistics hub of Pokrovsk. Russia’s defense ministry said its troops had “liberated the settlement of Novohradska,” some 20 kilometers (12 miles) from Pokrovsk.
It is one of Russia’s more considerable territorial conquests in recent weeks and was home to more than 14,000 residents before Moscow launched its full-scale offensive in February 2022. Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin said his main aim in Ukraine after 30 months of fighting was to capture the eastern Donbas area, to which Donetsk belongs.
He claimed that was now easier because of Ukraine’s Kursk counter-offensive. Moscow drew fresh condemnation on Sunday after its drones were spotted in Latvia and Romania, both NATO and EU members.”A Russian military drone. I fell in the eastern part of Latvia yesterday. An investigation is underway,” Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics said on X, formerly Twitter.
Romania meanwhile said a Russian assault drone aimed at civilian infrastructure in Ukraine overnight had entered its airspace.”NATO needs to react to the fact that Russian ‘Shaheds’ feel free to fly in the airspace of European countries. They need to be shot down,” said Andriy Yermak, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, about the Iranian-style self-detonating drones.
On Sunday, Zelensky himself also called on Kyiv’s partners to give him more scope to use Western-supplied weapons against targets inside Russia. “In just one week alone, Russia has used more than 800 guided aerial bombs, close to 300 Shahed drones, and more than 60 kinds of missiles against our people,” he said in a posting on his Facebook page.
“Terror can only be reliably stopped in one way: by striking Russian military airfields-their bases-and the logistics of Russian terror,” he said. Seven people were reported killed across the country on Sunday after Russian rocket, missile, and shelling attacks.
Two people died in an air strike on the Ukrainian city of Sumy, the capital of the region from where Ukraine poured troops and tanks across the border into Russia in its shock counter-attack.”Four more people were injured, including two children,” Sumy military authorities said in a statement.
Four were killed in separate Russian rocket and missile strikes on the frontline Donetsk region late Saturday and early Sunday, local officials said. Shelling of the northeastern Kharkiv region killed one and wounded 10, the region’s governor said. Officials in the central city of Poltava said the death toll from a strike. At a military education facility last week, they had risen to 58 after three more casualties succumbed to their injuries.
Russian strikes also killed seven in the western city of Lviv last week, a relatively rare deadly strike on the city hundreds of kilometers from the frontlines and close to Ukraine’s borders with EU and Nato members. Kyiv has been calling for the West to supply longer-range missiles and lift restrictions on their use for months.
