logo
Ukraine says Russia launched 479 drones in war's biggest overnight bombardment

Ukraine says Russia launched 479 drones in war's biggest overnight bombardment

Russia launched 479 drones at Ukraine in the war's biggest overnight drone bombardment, the Ukrainian air force said on Monday.
Apart from drones, 20 missiles of various types were fired at different parts of Ukraine, according to the air force, which said the barrage targeted mainly central and western areas of Ukraine.
Ukraine's air defences destroyed 277 drones and 19 missiles in mid-flight, an air force statement said, claiming that only 10 drones or missiles hit their target.
Officials said one person was injured.
It was not possible to independently verify the claim.
A recent escalation in aerial attacks has coincided with a renewed Russian battlefield push on eastern and north-eastern parts of the roughly 1,000-kilometre (620-mile) front line.
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky said late on Sunday that in some of those areas 'the situation is very difficult'. He provided no details.
Ukraine is short-handed on the front line against its bigger enemy and needs further military support from its Western partners, especially air defences. But uncertainty about the US policy on the war has fuelled doubts about how much help Kyiv can count on.
Two recent rounds of direct peace talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Istanbul have yielded no significant breakthroughs beyond pledges to swap prisoners as well as thousands of their dead and seriously wounded troops.
Russia's aerial attacks usually start late in the evening and end in the morning, because drones are harder to spot in the dark.
Russia has relentlessly battered civilian areas of Ukraine with Shahed drones during the more than three-year war. The attacks have killed more that 12,000 Ukrainian civilians, according to the United Nations.
Russia says it targets only military targets.
Ukraine has developed long-range drones that continue to strike deep inside Russia.
Russia's Ministry of Defence said on Monday that it shot down 49 Ukrainian drones overnight over seven Russian regions.
Two drones hit a plant specialising in electronic warfare equipment in the Chuvashia region, located more than 600 kilometres east of Moscow, local officials reported.
Alexander Gusev, head of Russia's Voronezh region, said 25 drones had been shot down there overnight, damaging a gas pipeline and sparking a small fire.
The Ukrainian General Staff claimed special operations forces forces struck two Russian fighter jets stationed at the Savasleyka airfield in Russia's Novgorod region located some 650 kilometres from the Ukrainian border.

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Explainer: How Iran's network of Middle East power faded
Explainer: How Iran's network of Middle East power faded

Reuters

timean hour ago

  • Reuters

Explainer: How Iran's network of Middle East power faded

June 12 (Reuters) - At previous moments of tension over decades of rivalry with Western foes, Iran was able to project power across the Middle East using a network of close allies that meant any strikes against it threatened to trigger a formidable response. Now, with talks deadlocked over its nuclear programme and U.S. President Donald Trump saying an Israeli strike on Iran "could very well happen," Tehran must face a fresh crisis with those capabilities greatly diminished. The United States killed the mastermind of Iran's regional network in 2020 and since the war in Gaza began 20 months ago, Israel has hammered Tehran's closest ally Hezbollah while rebels ousted its main regional partner, Syria's President Bashar al-Assad. Here is how Iran built up its "Axis of Resistance", how that network has come undone, and the regional resources Tehran can still count on. Iran spent decades after its 1979 Islamic Revolution developing a network of allies across the Middle East that accepted Tehran's leadership and shared its regional vision of fighting what they described as Western imperialism. This "Axis of Resistance", as it was dubbed, drew on the appeal of Iran's revolutionary theocratic ideas to traditionally marginalised fellow Shi'ite Muslims across the region, and on its staunch support for Palestinian nationalism. It grew to include Hezbollah in Lebanon, President Bashar al-Assad's government in Syria, Shi'ite Muslim armed groups in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen and the Palestinian militant group Hamas - extending Iran's influence to both the Mediterranean and Red Sea. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and its elite Quds Force lay at the heart of the axis. The IRGC answers to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and was set up soon after the revolution as an ideologically committed counterweight to the regular armed forces. The Quds Force operates as the IRGC's overseas wing, working closely with allies in the Axis of Resistance to train and arm them, and to provide direction and guidance in their military operations. Its tough, shrewd commander Major-General Qassem Soleimani was killed by a U.S. drone attack in Iraq in 2020 after decades spent knitting together groups across the region and Iran has struggled to replace him. When Hamas attacked Israeli communities on October 7, 2023, it triggered massive military retaliation that has killed much of the group's top leadership including political chief Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated in Tehran last summer. Hamas is still fighting in Gaza and retains a significant presence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, but it does not presently boast a military force capable of posing a realistic threat to Israel. The war quickly spread as Iran's most important regional ally Hezbollah fired on Israel from Lebanon in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, leading to months of cross-border fire between the group and Israel. That conflict suddenly escalated in September 2024 when Israel detonated thousands of booby-trapped pagers used by Hezbollah operatives, killing and maiming hundreds of them. Over the following weeks a string of Israeli airstrikes killed Hezbollah's top leadership including overall chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, dealing the group a stunning blow and revealing how far it had been infiltrated. Hezbollah accepted a ceasefire with Israel in November and remains far from the powerful organisation that once threatened Israeli security. Syria's Assad was ousted soon afterwards. Israel had targeted top Iranian commanders in Syria with airstrikes over the summer, causing a partial IRGC pullout. Without Iranian and Hezbollah support, and ally Russia bogged down with war in Ukraine, Assad's army crumbled when rebels mounted an offensive in late November and he fled in December. With Hamas and Hezbollah greatly weakened, Iran can still turn to the Shi'ite militias it supports in Iraq and to the Houthis in Yemen. Iraq has a constellation of Iran-aligned armed groups but just a handful count among the most loyal and powerful to Tehran, including Kataib Hezbollah and the Nujaba group. These groups receive arms and directives from Iran and have pledged allegiance to Iran's supreme leader but retain a degree of autonomy on their operations inside Iraq. They have all but ceased attacks targeting U.S. forces and Israel since last year. Analysts question how far they would go to protect Iran if an attack was aimed at its nuclear sites rather than as part of an effort to topple the Islamic Republic given that would pose an existential threat to their main source of support. The Houthis have continued to fire missiles at Israel, but their ability to pose a significant threat from their distant base in Yemen is in doubt. Their attacks on Red Sea shipping have cooled since striking a deal with the U.S. after weeks of bombings in the spring.

Harvard researcher is released from federal custody following accusations of smuggling frog embryos
Harvard researcher is released from federal custody following accusations of smuggling frog embryos

NBC News

timean hour ago

  • NBC News

Harvard researcher is released from federal custody following accusations of smuggling frog embryos

Kseniia Petrova, a Harvard scientist who was arrested last month on a federal smuggling charge, was released Wednesday from federal custody following a detention hearing in Boston. Petrova, a Russian citizen, was taken into custody in May after prosecutors in Massachusetts accused her of smuggling frog embryos into the United States without properly declaring them. She was released Thursday on conditions agreed to by both sides. A probable cause hearing on the smuggling charge is tentatively set for June 18. Petrova had been in custody since February, when her visa was revoked at Boston Logan International Airport. 'I just want to thank everybody,' Petrova said outside the federal courthouse in Boston after her release. She said letters and messages from supporters helped her feel less alone while in custody. 'It was a huge support without which I won't be able to survive,' she said. Initially held in a Vermont facility, she was transferred to a Louisiana immigration detention center, where she filed a petition arguing that her detention was unlawful and that she feared persecution if returned to Russia because she had participated in protests against the war in Ukraine. She was moved to federal criminal custody in May after being charged with smuggling. At the time of her arrest, Petrova was working at a Harvard lab, where she had developed computer scripts to analyze images from a microscope that scientists say could transform cancer detection. Her colleagues told NBC News that she was the only person on the team with the rare combination of skills needed to interpret the data. 'That was only her. It was only her,' Leon Peshkin, her mentor and a principal research scientist at Harvard, previously said. Petrova described being confused and isolated after her arrest, saying she was held in a cell without contact with her lawyer or colleagues. 'Nobody knew what was happening to me,' she said. 'I didn't have any contact, not to my lawyer, not to Leon, not to anybody.' In late May, a federal judge in Vermont ordered her release from immigration custody citing concerns about the legal basis for her visa revocation and extended detention. She faces another immigration court hearing in July.

Russia is amplifying conspiracy theories about the L.A. protests
Russia is amplifying conspiracy theories about the L.A. protests

NBC News

timean hour ago

  • NBC News

Russia is amplifying conspiracy theories about the L.A. protests

Protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles have triggered a flood of falsehoods and conspiracy theories online, and Russia has sought to exploit and amplify them, experts say. Russian media and pro-Russian voices have embraced right-wing conspiracy theories about the protests, including one that alleged the Mexican government was encouraging the demonstrations against President Donald Trump's immigration policies. Mexico has strongly rejected the accusation — which was repeated by Trump's chief of homeland security — as utterly false. The episode illustrates how foreign adversaries are taking advantage of genuine divisions among Americans, a tried-and-true strategy in information warfare, analysts say. Right-wing American voices online are pushing the idea that the protests in Los Angeles are not what they appear and that a secret, leftist cabal tied to Democratic politicians and the billionaire philanthropist George Soros is orchestrating unrest, experts said. 'We are following a playbook that we've followed many times before. We're seeing a lot of the same tropes, even a lot of the same exact conspiracy theories that we've seen circulate around previous protests,' said Darren Linvill, a professor at Clemson University who studies social media disinformation. There were echoes of how falsehoods spread during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, he said. 'People are, as they tend to do on social media, believing the messages that they're inclined to believe,' Linvill said. 'And influencers are taking advantage of that, oftentimes with false or sort of purposefully misleading content.' Right-wing users have posted baseless assertions that the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, has ties to the CIA and is orchestrating protests to oust President Donald Trump. 'Bass is a political warlord. She's utilizing her expertise to encourage these riots—to try to topple Trump & you,' wrote conservative podcast host Liz Wheeler on a post on X. Moustafa Ayad of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an international nonprofit that focuses on 'safeguarding democracy,' said there were parallels to how social media users have reacted to previous protests or to hurricanes that struck the Southeast last year. 'I liken it to the aftermath of Milton and Helene last year,' Ayad said. 'We have a crisis or a conflict point that is occurring, and there are numerous narratives that are being spread online that the government is somehow involved in the protests, paying protesters, or this is a deep-state plot against the United States by the CIA and other government actors,' Ayad said. From the political left, narratives online have focused on how the federal government and the military were allegedly preparing to use lethal force, while right-leaning voices warned of plots to oust Trump and cause chaos in American cities, according to Ayad. 'It's a bit like being on a seesaw, just gyrating between those two things,' he said. 'Sadly, there's this giant reinforcing loop that just builds further steam as the protests continue day to day.' Baseless claims of Mexico fomenting violence Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Tuesday repeated baseless assertions online that the Mexican government was encouraging violent protests. Mexico's president, Claudia Sheinbaum, quickly responded, rejecting the accusation as 'absolutely false' but saying she was confident that the 'misunderstanding will be cleared up.' The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Conservative and pro-Russian social media accounts cited an outdated video of the Mexican president as the basis for their claims she was fomenting protests in Los Angeles, according to NewsGuard, a fact-checking website. The video was taken from a press conference on May 24, nearly two weeks before the start of the L.A. protests. The Mexican president's remarks were taken out of context. Sheinbaum was referring to a proposed tax by the Trump administration on any income earned by Mexican immigrants that is sent on to their families in Mexico. She criticized the proposal and said at the time: 'If necessary, we'll mobilize' against the tax. Conservative commentator Benny Johnson then posted the May 24 clip of Sheinbaum after protests began last week in Los Angeles and wrote that she was calling for protests in the United States. The post has received 6.7 million views. At a news conference on Monday, Sheinbaum made clear her government opposes any violence associated with protests. 'We do not agree with violent actions as a form of protest.' An opportunity for Russia Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund think tank's Alliance for Securing Democracy, said Russia's information operations online were embracing pro-Trump portrayals of the protests as a leftist violent assault. 'Russia is in effect cheering on Trump's response and suggesting that it's warranted,' Schafer said. 'They have certainly intimated that these protests are being staged or funded by the radical left.' Russian news outlet Komsomolskaya Pravda quoted a Russian blogger in L.A. saying the protesters were not migrants but 'militants' who arrived on buses. Russian nationalist commentator Alexander Dugin wrote on X that the protests were an insurrection, a 'nationwide conspiracy of liberals against not only Trump but against American people in general.' Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer dubbed the 'Merchant of Death' by U.S. and British authorities who was released in a prisoner exchange in 2022 after spending 11 years behind bars in the United States, also weighed in on the protests. Russian media outlet Pravda quoted Bout comparing the demonstrations to the 2014 Maidan protests in Ukraine against what was then a pro-Moscow government, with Bout claiming the L.A. protests were highly organized. Pravda also quoted Sergei Markov, a former adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying the United States was in the middle of a 'civil war' pitting coastal states against interior states. Sputnik reposted a viral image of a pallet of bricks, asking why it was near the protest sites. But fact-checkers at Lead Stories geolocated the photo to a construction site about 3,000 miles away, in New Jersey. Beijing accuses Washington of hypocrisy China, however, was taking a different tack. Instead of leaning into pro-Trump narratives and repeating right-wing conspiracy theories, Beijing portrayed America as a country in turmoil. Chinese media and pro-China voices argued the American government's response to protests in Los Angeles was 'heavy-handed and therefore hypocritical' in light of Washington's criticisms of other countries' treatment of dissent, according to Schafer. An affiliate of China's global television network reminded viewers that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had praised protests in Hong Kong in 2019 as a 'beautiful sight' but asked if the American government viewed the L.A. protests in the same way. A pro-Beijing commentator, Li Jingjing, denounced what she called U.S. interference in other countries' affairs even as it denounced protesters on its soil. 'US hypocrisy at its best,' she wrote in a post. The pervasive online image of the supposed pallet of bricks frequently shows up when there are street protests, according to the Social Media Lab, a research team at Toronto Metropolitan University. 'It's catnip for right-wing agitators and grifters,' the lab said in a social media post. 'The fact that these types of fake images are used isn't a coincidence. It's part of a pernicious & persistent narrative that protests against government policies are somehow inauthentic,' it added. The approach is 'meant to make these movements seem less legitimate or less worthy of public support.'

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store