Russia advances in east Ukraine, launches deadly air strikes

A boy and his mother sit next to a placard reading “Give me back my father” as they take part to a rally with relatives and friends of Ukrainian prisoner of war from the Azov Brigade and sub-units, in Kyiv on September 8, 2024, calling for their exchange with Russian prisoners, amid Russian invasion in Ukraine. Agence France-Presse

KYIV — Russia on Sunday said its forces had advanced in eastern Ukraine as Kyiv reported deadly air attacks and urged the West to allow it to carry out more retaliatory strikes 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.

Moscow has stepped up its aerial attacks in recent weeks, but it is also trying to fight off a major Ukrainian cross-border offensive into its western Kursk region, which has reshaped the course of the two-and-a-half-year war.

READ: Four killed, scores wounded in Russian air strikes on Ukraine

Kyiv launched its Kursk offensive on August 6 hoping to force Russia to redeploy troops pressing forward in the east of the country. But Moscow has appeared to intensify its attacks there, chalking up its most significant territorial gains in almost two years over the month of August.

And on Sunday, its military claimed to have captured another small village on the route towards the key logistics hub of Pokrovsk in the eastern Donetsk region.

Russia’s defense ministry said its troops had “liberated the settlement of Novohrodivka”, which lies around 20 kilometers (12 miles) from Pokrovsk.

READ: Russia says repelled ‘massive’ Ukrainian drone attack

The town is one of Russia’s larger territorial conquests of recent weeks, home to more than 14,000 inhabitants before Moscow launched its full-scale offensive in February 2022.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said last week his main aim in Ukraine after 30 months of fighting was to capture the eastern Donbas area, which includes Donetsk.

He claimed that Ukraine’s Kursk counter-offensive had made that easier.

Drones breach NATO airspace

Moscow drew fresh condemnation on Sunday after its drones were detected in Latvia and Romania, both NATO and EU members.

A “Russian military drone… crashed in the eastern part of Latvia yesterday. There is an ongoing investigation,” Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics said on X, formerly Twitter.

Romania said a Russian attack drone targeting civilian infrastructure in Ukraine overnight had entered its airspace.

“NATO must respond to the fact that Russian ‘Shaheds’ feel free to fly in the airspace of European countries. They need to be shot down,” Andriy Yermak, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, said on Telegram, referring to the Iranian-style self-detonating drones.

Zelensky himself on Sunday also urged Kyiv’s partners to give him more scope to use Western-supplied weapons against targets inside Russia.

“In just one week, Russia has used over 800 guided aerial bombs, nearly 300 Shahed drones, and more than 60 missiles of various types against our people,” he said in a Facebook post.

“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 on a military education facility last week 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 kilometres from the frontlines and close to Ukraine’s borders with EU and NATO members.

Kyiv has for months been calling for the West to supply longer-range missiles and lift restrictions on their use.