Ukrainian forces destroyed 25 Russian attack drones out of 38 launched overnight, Ukraine’s air force chief said on Thursday.
“Last night, the enemy used 38 Shahed-131/136 attack drones, attacking Ukrainian infrastructure in several areas, including the south of Odesa region and central Ukraine,” Mykola Oleshchiuk said.
The air force chief said three other drones “were lost after crossing the state border with Romania”. He gave no more details.
Romania’s defence ministry confirmed on Thursday it had found fragments of a Russian Geran 1/2 drone near the village of Plauru across the Danube from Ukraine’s river port of Izmail.
Searches for other fragments were continuing, the ministry said in a statement, adding that all locations where drones might have fallen “were outside residential areas and no infrastructure elements were damaged.”
Along the Danube river, Romanian territory is just a few hundred metres from Ukraine’s Izmail in the Odesa region that was attacked by drones for the second night in a row.
Odesa governor Oleh Kiper said two people were wounded when drone debris hit a private house in Izmail district.
Authorities in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and in the Zhytomyr region said those regions had also been targeted.
Zhytomyr’s governor said that air defence systems hit most of the 10 aerial targets overnight but drone debris damaged 10 private houses and one infrastructure facility.
The head of Kyiv’s military administration, Serhiy Popko, said that drones attacked the capital from different directions, but all of them were destroyed by air defence forces on the approaches. Popko said there were no reports of damage or casualties in Kyiv.
Authorities in the southern region of Kherson said that a man had been killed in the street in a separate attack after a drone dropped explosives on him.
Ukrainian troops regained control of much of the Kherson region in late 2022 following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of that year but Russian forces still shell Ukrainian-held areas from positions on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River and launch drones.
In Romania, two Finnish F-18 fighter jets currently part of Nato air policing missions, scrambled overnight to monitor the attack.
Nato member Romania shares a 650-km border with Ukraine and has had Russian drone fragments stray into its territory repeatedly over the past year.