Kiev, April 20, (dpa/GNA) – Russia has attacked Ukraine with more than two dozen Iranian-made drones in the past 24 hours, Ukraine’s general staff said on Thursday morning.
Ukrainian air defences were able to shoot down 21 of the 26 unmanned Shahed-136 drones, which are designed to fly towards a target and then explode on impact, the military said.
In addition, the general staff said the armed forces successfully withstood 55 Russian ground attacks in fighting concentrated in the eastern Donetsk region, where the fiercely contested city of Bakhmut is located.
The Russian Defence Ministry and the private military company Wagner have reported taking control of more and more areas of Bakhmut, which had a pre-war population of 70,000 and is now a mostly destroyed wasteland after months of gruelling fighting.
The Ukrainian general staff claimed Russian losses there are very high and that Moscow’s fighters are low on both ammunition and morale.
“Heavy fighting around Bakhmut continues,” the general staff said.
Fourteen months into the all-out invasion, Kiev sees holding on to Bakhmut as critical to preventing Russian troops from breaking through further into the interior of the country.
Meanwhile in the capital Kiev, an unusual burst of light on the night horizon on Wednesday caused an air alert. Shortly afterwards, the city’s military administration announced on Telegram that a retired NASA satellite that had entered the Earth’s atmosphere may have caused the phenomenon.
An air raid alert was sounded, but air defences were not activated, it said.
On its official Facebook page, however, NASA denied that the flash was caused by a NASA satellite. “We have been tracking our retired RHESSI satellite’s expected reentry, but it was still hours away from reentering when those videos were posted,” it said in reply to a user question.
GNA