Kiev:
Ukraine said it destroyed most of the 45 attack drones Russia launched overnight, with little damage reported Sunday morning.
The announcement comes a day after authorities said seven people were killed in a Russian attack that set fire to a gas station in Ukraine's second-largest city, Kharkiv.
“Overnight, the occupiers launched 45 attack drones… As a result of combat work, 40 enemy Shahed (UAV) were destroyed,” the Ukrainian Air Force said on Telegram.
Falling debris slightly injured a 39-year-old man in the southern Dnipro region, Governor Sergiy Lysak said.
Authorities from the capital Kiev and the central Cherkasy region said there were no signs of damage so far.
But air-guided bombs targeted the village of Vodyane, in the Kharkov region, killing a 56-year-old woman, Governor Oleg Synegubov said.
The day before, seven people had been killed in his region after a Russian drone strike hit a gas station, spilling burning fuel into the adjacent street. The Black Sea port of Odessa was also affected, as were industrial facilities in Izmail, near the border with Moldova.
Police on the Moldovan side of the border said they had found fragments of what they said was an Iranian-made Shahed drone outside the town of Etulia.
“The Russian war against Ukraine once again hits close to home in Moldova. The discovery of Shahed drone debris in southern Moldova today serves once again as a stark reminder of the grim reality we face,” pro-European Moldovan President Maia Sandu said on X, formerly Twitter.
“Russian aggression puts the entire continent at risk. Support to Ukraine must continue.”
Ukrainian intelligence said on Saturday that Russian forces have started using billionaire Elon Musk's Starlink satellite internet service on the front lines, with the network previously used by Kiev's forces but not by Moscow's.
“Yes, there have been recorded cases of the use of these devices by Russian occupiers. It is beginning to take on a systemic character,” Andriy Yusov, spokesman for the Main Directorate of Kyiv Military Intelligence, told RBC-Ukraine magazine.
According to the Ukrainian news agency UNIAN, intercepts of radio communications on the battlefield had indicated that Russian forces stationed near Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine had “began using Starlink en masse at the front.”
The network has played a crucial role in maintaining Ukrainian military communications so far.
Now Ukrainian military bloggers say that Russia has acquired Starlink terminals through third countries.
Kiev has thanked Musk's SpaceX company, which owns Starlink, for access to the technology, which doesn't work in Russia – but was saddened when Musk recently suggested ceding some land for a peace settlement.
The billionaire tech mogul claimed to have prevented a Ukrainian attack on a Russian naval base in 2022 by refusing a request from Kiev to activate Internet access via Starlink in the Black Sea, near the Moscow-annexed Crimean Peninsula.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)