Did Ukraine start a drone war on Russia?
Al Jazeera‘Does the defence ministry have a plan to protect our cities?’ a pro-Kremlin figure wrote on Telegram, a sign of growing unease. Russian officials and media, using that term – “unidentified foreign objects” – seem unnerved and are accusing Ukraine of drone attacks. With a dash of black humour, presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak tweeted that a sense of “panic and collapse” was growing in Russia, “manifested by increasing domestic attacks of unidentified flying objects on infrastructure sites”. Air space over Russia’s second-largest city that lies almost 1,500km north of Ukraine was briefly closed, and fighter jets took off as part of a rehearsal – drills to “train for interception and identification of a conditional target,” a defence official reportedly said. Hours earlier, “unidentified flying objects” reportedly crashed near an oil refinery and a farm in southwestern Russia, more than 800km from the nearest Ukrainian military installations in Odesa.