Kyiv [Ukraine], June 5: Ukrainian officials said Russia launched a new round of air strikes in Ukraine early on June 4, hitting an airport in the central region of the country but failing to hit the capital Kyiv. Meanwhile, the leader of a Russian locality bordering Ukraine said the area continued to be attacked.
According to Reuters, Ukrainian air force spokesman YuriyIhnat told local television that four of the six Russian cruise missiles were shot down by the air defenses, but two of them hit a "combat airfield." near the city of Kropyvnytskyi in central Ukraine. He also said that two of the five Russian unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) launched by Russia crashed on infrastructure in the northern Sumy province.
Kyiv officials said air defenses shot down all the objects flying towards the Ukrainian capital before they reached the city. The whole of Ukraine was put on air raid alert for nearly three hours. Earlier, a missile attack killed a 2-year-old girl and injured 22 people near the city of Dnipro in central Ukraine, according to local leaders.
Since May, Russia has promoted frequent attacks on Kyiv, especially at night. According to Ukrainian officials , this is an attempt to damage the morale of the Ukrainian forces in the face of a major counter-offensive operation they may be about to launch. Russia has always denied targeting Ukrainian civilians.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the border, the leader of Russia's Belgorod province announced that the area continued to receive new shelling before dawn on June 4. The RIA news agency quoted VyacheslavGladkov, the provincial governor, as saying that the border districts of Shebekinsky and Volokonovsky had been attacked by Ukraine and suffered a lot of damage, but the loss of life was not immediately clear.
In recent days, Belgorod leadership has repeatedly reported shelling, which has killed a total of four people and injured eight others, according to RIA. Ukraine has never publicly acknowledged being behind attacks inside Russia.
In addition, TASS news agency on June 4 quoted Sergei Aksyonov, the head of the pro-Russian government in Crimea, as saying that the city of Dzhankoi in this region was attacked by nine drones, but there were no casualties. According to Aksyonov, Russian forces shot down five UAVs, while the remaining four were jammed with electronic warfare systems and crashed.
According to Reuters, Russia has an air base near Dzhankoi. Ukrainian officials have long argued that the city and its environs have been upgraded into Moscow's largest military base in Crimea.
Source: ThanhNien Newspaper