Ukraine and Russia exchanged drone attacks overnight into June 8, with both sides shooting down the majority of the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
Ukrainian air defenses shot down nine out of 13 Russian drones in the early hours of June 8, Air Force commander Lieutenant General Mykola Oleshchuk said in a statement.
Meanwhile, Russia’s Defense Ministry said its air defenses had intercepted 27 Ukrainian drones, including over North Ossetia, marking the first drone attack on the region since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Ukraine’s Air Force chief said air defenses downed nine Iranian-made Shahed-type UAVs over the central Poltava region, the southeastern Zaporizhzhya and Dnipropetrovsk regions, and the Kharkiv region in the northeast.
An X-59 Russian missile launched from the Kursk region was also shot down, Oleschuk said.
Russian forces, meanwhile, said they shot down Ukrainian drones over Krasnodar, Astrakhan, Belgorod, Bryansk, Rostov, Tula, and North Ossetia. Drones were also intercepted over the Russia-annexed Crimean Peninsula, the ministry said.
North Ossetia’s governor, Sergei Menyailo, said a military airfield in Mozdok was the target.
No casualties were reported by the Russian authorities, but the downing of the drones caused some damage in several regions, including North Ossetia and Belgorod.
The AFP news agency and the Ukrainska Pravda newspaper quoted a military intelligence source in Kyiv as saying the "drone attack on the airfield in North Ossetia is a special operation of the GUR," referring to Ukraine's military intelligence service.
A day earlier, Vladimir Saldo, the head of Russian occupation authorities in Ukraine's southern Kherson region, claimed 22 people were killed and 15 were injured in the town of Sadove in shelling by Ukrainian forces.
On June 8, Leonid Pasechnik, the Russia-installed governor in Ukraine’s partially occupied Luhansk region, that two more bodies had been pulled from the rubble following Ukrainian missile attacks on the regional capital on June 7, bringing the death toll in the region to five.
Ukraine has not commented on either attack.
On the diplomatic front, French President Emmanuel Macron and U.S. President Joe Biden, meeting in Paris on June 8, repeated their support for Ukraine in its fight against the Russian invasion.
Russian President Vladimir "Putin is not going to stop at Ukraine.... All of Europe will be threatened. We are not going to let that happen," Biden told reporters, speaking alongside Macron. "The United States is standing strong with Ukraine. We will not -- I say it again -- walk away."
