Russian strikes kill two Ukrainian civilians as Moscow and Kyiv threaten to raise stakes — SkimNews
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- Russia launched 174 attack drones — about half of them jet-powered and hard to intercept — plus two ballistic missiles and two air-launched missiles at Ukraine overnight into Wednesday, killing two civilians in Dnipro when strikes hit food warehouses belonging to a local retail chain and wounding at least six.
- Zelenskyy warned foreign airlines that "Russian airspace will effectively be closing" due to Ukrainian long-range drone strikes, framing the air campaign as military pressure to compel peace talks; Putin fired back by accusing Zelenskyy of "state terrorism" and declaring "We don't negotiate with terrorists."
- Putin declined to rule out striking British military facilities if the UK continues supplying weapons to Ukraine, telling reporters at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Kyrgyzstan with a small smile that the answer is "a military secret," after being asked about reports of British-made drones striking inside Russia.
- Russia's barrage also damaged a 24-story residential building in the Odesa region, destroying apartments on several floors and wounding eight people including a child, while a man and woman were hurt by shrapnel in the Kyiv region — the seventh straight day Kyiv came under attack.
- Russia's Defence Ministry said its air defences destroyed 130 Ukrainian drones overnight over 11 Russian regions, the Black Sea, and Crimea; separately, Ukrainian strikes killed two and wounded 16 in Russia's Belgorod border region, which acting governor Alexander Shuvayev said was hit 140 times in 24 hours.
- The Institute for the Study of War assessed that Russia's spring-summer offensive has "failed to smash Ukraine's front-line defences," with Russian advances in August amounting to "a fraction" of Moscow's gains during the same month last year as the eastern and southern front lines remain largely deadlocked.
- Germany on Tuesday formally blamed Russia for an attempted drone attack on Leipzig/Halle Airport last month using an explosives-laden drone — part of what European officials describe as Moscow's "campaign of continental sabotage and disruption aimed at weakening support for Ukraine."
Why it matters: With the front line deadlocked and US-brokered peace talks stalled, Putin is leaving open the option of striking a NATO member's military facilities — an escalation threshold neither side has tested. Russia's pivot to systematically hitting Ukrainian food warehouses, even as its ground offensive stalls according to ISW, signals a strategy of trying to break civilian morale where the battlefield won't.
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