Dramatic video Thursday showed a Ukrainian drone attack on a military airfield in southern Russia, as Kyiv launches an expanding wave of strikes deep inside its neighbor’s territory.
Through the huge plumes of smoke filling the sky above the airbase, three small explosions can be seen as a man driving through the flat landscape points his camera at the fire and delivers an expletive-laden rant.
“There it is flying by, f–k. F—ing flying over again… It’s a serious tragedy, folks. This is serious stuff. It’s all fu—ng on fire,” he says. “That’s really something else. And all the new hangars, it’s all blown up in the air, f–k.”
The video, like others posted to the Telegram messaging app showing the blaze, was geolocated by NBC News.
The region’s governor, Andrei Bocharov, said in a post on Telegram early Thursday that a UAV attack was “repelled,” but that as a result a fire broke out at a Ministry of Defense facility located some 185 miles from the border with Ukraine.
Russian officials did not specify the nature of the facility, but a Ukrainian security source told NBC News that its military attacked the region’s Marinovka airbase, targeting warehouses storing anti-tank weapons and fuel.
“The Security Service of Ukraine works with surgical precision at the airfields from which the enemy attacks Ukraine. Each such implementation reduces the superiority of the Russians in the air and significantly limits their aviation capabilities,” the source said.
The airbase, which is home to the 11th Composite Aviation Regiment of the Russian Air Force, houses dozens of aircraft. Satellite imagery captured on Aug. 19 showed more than 40 planes on the tarmac at the base.
Fires were present at the site on Thursday, according to a satellite imaging tool created by NASA which was developed to monitor wildfires but also detects thermal anomalies.
The drone attack is the latest in a series of Ukrainian actions to take the war deep inside Russia.
Thursday’s attack on the airbase was one of multiple overnight. “Thirteen UAVs were shot down over Volgograd region, seven over Rostov region, four over Belgorod region, two over Voronezh region, and one each over Bryansk and Kursk regions,” the Russian Ministry of Defense said.
A blaze continued for a fifth day on Thursday at a major oil depot in the town of Proletarsk in Russia’s Rostov region after Ukraine said it had carried out a drone attack on the site.
And a large-scale drone attack on the capital Moscow on Wednesday was the biggest of the war, authorities said.
While it has for months conducted aerial attacks on strategic Russian targets, Ukraine upended the war with its daring assault that saw troops and heavy armor crossing into the southern Russian region of Kursk. Strategic bridges have been damaged, border villages taken over, and dozens of POWs captured while the Kremlin has struggled to repel the incursion.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the Ukrainian region of Sumy on Thursday, touring the area from which his troops launched the surprise Kursk attack.
As Ukraine intensifies its cross-border operations, a growing wave of local residents have fled.
In a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and heads of border regions Thursday, the acting Governor of Kursk stated that 133,000 residents had been internally displaced since the beginning of the incursion while the country’s First Deputy Prime Minister said that 115,000 people had been evacuated from other regions bordering Ukraine.
And authorities in Kursk began to put up concrete shelters at bus stops and other locations, the region’s acting Gov. Alexei Smirnov said on his Telegram channel.
Yuliya Talmazan and The Associated Press contributed.