Two Ukrainian drones attacked the Russian town of Kurchatov, home to a nuclear power plant in the Kursk region, early on Friday, governor Roman Starovoit said.
Emergency services were assessing the damage suffered by an administrative building and a residential one in the attack, he wrote on the Telegram messaging app. Starovoit did not mention any potential damage to the Kursk nuclear power plant or give details of the targeted buildings.
‘Strikes to continue’
A senior Ukrainian official said on Friday that drone strikes on Russian soil were set to increase and that recent such attacks showed that the war in Ukraine was gradually shifting to Russia.
In an interview, presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said Ukraine had ramped up its strikes on occupied areas, and attacks inside Russia itself would also increase, carried out by “agents” or “partisans”.
“As for Russia ... there is an increasing number of attacks by unidentified drones launched from the territory of the Russian Federation, and the number of these attacks will increase,” Podolyak told Reuters.
“Because this is the stage of the war… when hostilities are gradually being transferred to the territory of the Russian Federation,” he said in the interview in his office in the heavily defended government district in Kyiv.
Drone attacks on Russia have sharply increased in scale and frequency in recent weeks, culminating this week with strikes that hit six
Russian regions in one night and destroyed transport planes in a blaze at a military airfield.
Ukraine generally cheers such attacks while stopping short of openly claiming direct responsibility for them. Its western allies forbid it from using weapons they donate to strike Russia, although
they say Kyiv has the right to carry out such attacks on military targets with its own weapons.
As the attacks have increased in frequency, Kyiv has touted its progress in developing long-range strike weapons to give it an answer to Russia’s campaign of air strikes.
President Zelensky on Thursday praised what he said was the use of new Ukrainian weaponry with a range of 700 km.
