LAST UPDATE | 6 Aug 2023

MOSCOW UNLEASHED A massive missile and drone barrage on western Ukraine on Sunday, following through on its promise to retaliate for a Ukrainian attack on a Russian tanker.

Russian and Ukrainian shelling across the country overnight killed in at least six people, officials said.

Separately, Moscow’s second-largest airport briefly suspended flights early today following a foiled drone attack near the Russian capital.

Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched 70 attack drones and missiles, including cruise missiles from aircraft over the Caspian Sea and Iranian-made, Shahed-136/131 strike UAVs.

Serhiy Tyurin, deputy head of Ukraine’s Khmelnytsky region military administration, said three waves of missiles hit the Starokostiantyniv area, damaging several buildings and igniting a fire at a warehouse.

The strike may have been intended for the city’s airfield, officials said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the facilities of aircraft engine manufacturer Motor Sich in the Zaporizhzhia region had also come under attack.

The Russian barrage came after a Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian tanker in the Black Sea near Crimea late on Friday.

Ukraine also struck a major Russian port with drones earlier the same day.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova condemned what she called a Ukrainian “terrorist attack” on a civilian vessel in the Kerch Strait.

In a post on the Telegram messaging app, Zakharova said: “There can be no justification for such barbaric actions, they will not go unanswered and their authors and perpetrators will inevitably be punished.”

An official with Ukraine’s Security Service confirmed to The Associated Press that a Ukrainian drone packed with 450 kilograms (992 pounds) of explosive the service struck the tanker that as transporting fuel for Russian forces.

Russia’s Federal Agency for Marine and River Transport posted on Telegram that although the drone blasted a hole in the tanker’s engine room, there were no casualties among the 11 crew members.

Two of the six fatalities overnight occurred during a Russian air strike in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, according to the head of the local regional military administration, Oleh Syniehubov.

Another four people were injured.

Zelenskyy said that a guided bomb had hit a blood transfusion centre in the area’s Kupyan district late on Saturday.

He said: “This war crime alone says everything about Russian aggression. Defeating terrorists is a matter of honour for everyone who values life.”

Heavy shelling continued along the frontline in Eastern Ukraine as Kyiv continues to push forward with its ongoing counteroffensive.

Elsewhere in the Kharkiv region, a 58-year-old woman was killed and a 66-year-old man was admitted to hospital after Russian shelling of the village of Podoly, an official said.

In Ukraine’s eastern Kupyan region, Russian missiles injured a 55-year-old man and ignited a forest fire, officials said on social media.

Russian attacks in the Donetsk region villages of Torske and Niu-York killed two people, local governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said.

Ukrainian shelling in Russian-held Donetsk killed a woman in her eighties, the city’s Moscow-appointed mayor Alexei Kulemzin said.

The shelling also set the main building of a university on fire, according to the Moscow-installed head of the illegally annexed Donetsk region, Denis Pushilin.