A drone attack on Tuesday struck near an air base in Russia, a local official said, a day after Ukraine used drones to hit two military bases deep inside the country in one of its most brazen attacks in the nine-month war.

If Ukraine’s forces are confirmed to have been involved in the latest strike, it would add to signs that Kyiv is willing to bring the war closer to Moscow and to President Vladimir V. Putin.

Russian officials did not directly accuse Ukraine in Tuesday’s attack, which hit an oil facility near an airfield in the Kursk region, 80 miles from the Ukrainian border.

The regional governor said on Tuesday that a fire caused by the strike had been extinguished and that there were no injuries.

Ukraine’s willingness to hit far inside Russia’s border has altered the geography of the war, shown failures in Moscow’s air defence systems and signalled Kyiv’s determination that Russia pays a heavier price for its unrelenting assault on Ukraine’s infrastructure.

After Monday’s drone strikes, Russia launched a volley of missiles at Ukraine that left half of the capital region of Kyiv without electricity and worsened rolling power outages across the country.

Many Ukrainians have been without heat and water. Monday’s attacks struck two military installations hundreds of miles inside the Russian border — the Engels airfield and the Dyagilevo military base — according to Russia’s defence ministry and a senior Ukrainian official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to convey sensitive information.

The drones were launched from Ukrainian territory, and in at least one of the strikes Ukrainian special forces working near the base helped guide the drones to the target, the senior official said.

Ukraine has not explicitly claimed responsibility for those strikes, as is its practice regarding military actions inside Russia.

Yurii Ihnat, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Force, said that the damage to the airfield at Engels appeared minimal.

“But it is an alarming signal for them,” he said on Ukrainian national television.

Mick Ryan, a retired Australian Army officer, wroteon the Substack blogging platform that the strikes indicated how Ukraine “is now taking the fight to Putin”.

“It is not, as some are sure to claim, an escalation,” he wrote.

“But it is a necessary political and military measure for Ukraine to limit the humanitarian harm of Russia’s brutal drone and missile attacks.”

He said the strikes also carried symbolic import, with a strike so close to Moscow —Dyagilevo lies about 161km from the Russian capital —delivering “a psychological blow” to Russian people “who thought they were largely insulated from the effects of the war”.

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