KYIV, Ukraine — A huge drone strike shook Moscow and its suburbs all night and into Sunday. Several people were hurt, and some of Russia’s biggest airports had to temporarily stop traffic, according to officials. At the same time, a huge wave of Russian drones attacked Ukraine at night.
In the evening of Saturday, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a deal with North Korea that requires both countries to help each other with military action right away and in any way possible if one of them is attacked. The deal makes the connection between Moscow and Pyongyang stronger than it has been since the end of the Cold War.
Ukraine said earlier this week that its troops had fought with North Korean units for the first time. At least 3,000 North Korean troops have been sent to Russia, according to U.S. sources. However, Kyiv has said many times that the number is much higher. This has made people worry that Moscow’s war on Ukraine will get much worse and that conflict will spread to the Asia-Pacific region.
The UK thinks that Russia has lost 700,000 troops.
Since the full-scale war began, both Moscow and Kyiv have kept the number of deaths under wraps, even though there are regular accounts of Russian forces losing a lot of soldiers in “human wave” attacks meant to wear down Ukrainian defenses.
Tony Radakin, the head of the U.K. defense staff, told the BBC that October was the deadliest month for Russian forces since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He said that on average, 1,500 Russian soldiers were killed or hurt every day, for a total of 700,000 deaths in the war.
Radakin said that regular Russians were paying “an extraordinary price” for the war, even though the Russian attack in the industrial east of Ukraine has been going on for months and is still only making small gains. He didn’t say how the U.K. government came up with the number of Russian deaths.
It is clear that Russia is gaining territory and skills, which is putting stress on Ukraine, he said. But he also said that they were “tiny bits of land” and that Moscow’s rising spending on defense and security was making the country more stressed.
As friends of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump have said, Kyiv may have to give up land to find peace, Radakin insisted that Ukraine’s Western allies should stand by it for “as long as it takes” to stop Russian aggression.
Russia has some good feelings about Trump.
On Sunday, the official spokeswoman for the Kremlin was cautiously optimistic about Trump’s chances of becoming president. He said, “At least he talks about peace.” He doesn’t talk about getting into a fight.
“There are good signs.” Trump said during his campaign that he sees everything in terms of deals and that he can make deals that will bring peace to everyone, Dmitry Peskov told reporters at a meeting.
“He doesn’t say that he wants to give Russia a strategic defeat, which is a good thing that sets him apart from the current (U.S.) administration,” Peskov said.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday that Kyiv’s Western allies must make “strong decisions” to stop the “terror” of Russian missile and drone attacks and give Ukraine “reliable peace.”
He said in a post on the Telegram messaging app, “The killing of children and the loss of family members cannot just be forgotten.”
“There is no safety from terror without strong decisions, and this is true in every country.” “Peace is not possible without justice,” he said.
Drone attack on Ukrainian targets sets a “record”
Ukraine’s General Staff said on Sunday that fierce fighting has continued near the cities of Toretsk and Kurakhove in the east of the country. About 700 to 1,000 people still live in Kurakhove, a frontline city that is ringed on three sides and badly damaged. Most of them live underground and don’t have power, running water, or heat.
In the meantime, Russia’s Defense Ministry said that overnight, 84 Ukrainian drones were shot down on Russian soil in what it called a “mass strike on civilian infrastructure.” Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov said that drones hit an apartment building in Russia’s Belgorod region, just a few kilometers from the border with Ukraine, killing a man who was buried under the rubble.
Local police say that five more people were hurt in the Moscow suburb of Ramenskoe and a nearby village. Russian feeds on the messaging app Telegram had reports from people who saw pieces of drones setting fire to homes in the suburbs.
According to Russia’s aviation authority, flights were temporarily stopped at several big international airports, such as Sheremetyevo and Domodedovo. At least 14 planes that were supposed to go to Moscow were sent to Nizhnyi Novgorod instead, which is more than 300 miles east, according to people who work at that airport.
There was a fire at an arms depot in Russia’s southern Bryansk region on Sunday, according to Ukraine’s General Staff. The base is close to both Ukraine and Belarus. The web update had a picture of thick clouds of reddish smoke rising into the night sky. The Associated Press couldn’t confirm how it was taken, and Russia didn’t say anything right away.
A separate report from Russia’s emergency services on Sunday said that a big fire broke out in a building outside of Moscow. At first, no one was hurt, and it wasn’t clear if the fire had anything to do with the Ukrainian drone strikes.
Ukraine’s air force says that overnight Russia fired a “record” 145 drones at Ukrainian land. 62 of the drones were shot down. The air force said that another 67 were “lost,” which most likely means that electronic jamming sent the drones off track.
Odesa, the southern port of Ukraine, was hit by Russian drones that hurt at least one person, according to the city’s governor, Oleh Kiper. Local prosecutors and the governor of Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region said that falling drone parts and shelling hurt at least five people on Sunday. Among them were a 17-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy.
Later on Sunday, Russia said it had used thermobaric rockets to attack a big group of Ukrainian soldiers in the Kharkiv province, but it didn’t give any proof right away.
