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Comes amid mounting concern Russia could be behind growing number of recent drone incursions in airspace of Ukraine’s European allies
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At least five civilians have died after Russia launched drones, missiles and guided aerial bombs at Ukraine overnight in a major attack that officials there said targeted civilian infrastructure.
Moscow sent more than 50 ballistic missiles and around 500 drones into nine regions across Ukraine, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Sunday morning.
NATO member Poland said it scrambled aircraft early on Sunday to ensure its air safety after Russia launched the airstrikes on Ukraine, with Ukrainian officials reporting missiles and drones raining down on the Lviv region near the Polish border.
On Saturday, a Russian drone strike against a railway station hit a passenger train, killing one and wounding 30, as Moscow stepped up strikes on Ukraine‘s rail and power networks.
Meanwhile, German media reported that drones had been spotted at airports and military installations across Germany over the past two days, suggesting sightings this week at Munich Airport, which forced the closure of both runways, were the tip of the iceberg.
There is mounting concern that Russia could be behind a growing number of recent drone incursions in the airspace of Ukraine’s European allies.
Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Moscow of deliberately and openly trying to attack Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure in the recent military onslaught.
“Russia is openly trying to destroy our civilian infrastructure right now, ahead of winter – our gas infrastructure, our power generation and transmission,” he said in his nightly address.
“Zero real reaction from the world. We will fight so that the world does not remain silent and so that Russia feels the response,” Zelensky said.
Mystery drone incursions into European Union airspace have sparked considerable alarm among both the public and political figures in recent weeks.
These incidents, which extended to Nato airspace, reached an unprecedented scale last month, with some officials attributing them to Russia.
Such actions have been interpreted by some European officials as Moscow testing the alliance’s defensive capabilities, prompting concerns over Nato’s readiness against potential Russian aggression.
Countries are scrambling to figure out how to respond in the moment, including weighing whether to allow authorities to shoot the drones down.
Germany must improve its anti-drone defences, its defence minister said, but warned against a hasty response to airspace incursions by Russia which would risk falling into “Putin’s escalation trap”.
Boris Pistorius’ remarks in an interview with Handelsblatt newspaper followed drone sightings at Munich Airport that cancelled dozens of flights and stranded over 10,000 passengers this weekend.
Authorities have yet to attribute blame, but officials have said Russia was responsible for dozens of recent aircraft incursions and sightings in the airspace of Ukraine’s European allies.
“Putin knows Germany very, very well,” Pistorius said of the Russian President, who was a KGB agent in East Germany in the 1980s.
“We mustn’t fall into Putin’s escalation trap,” he added.
“If we shot an aeroplane down, he would claim the airspace violation was just pilot error and we had shot down an innocent young man,” he told Handelsblatt.
Russia’s air defence unit destroyed a drone heading for Moscow, the mayor of the capital said this morning.
Emergency services were despatched to the site where the debris fell, mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on Telegram.
US president Donald Trump said Russian president Vladimir Putin’s offer to voluntarily maintain limits on deployed strategic nuclear weapons “sounds like a good idea.”
Putin last month offered to voluntarily maintain limits capping the size of the world’s two biggest nuclear arsenals set out in the 2010 New START accord, which expires in February, if the US does the same.
“Sounds like a good idea to me,” Trump told reporters as he departed the White House, when asked about Putin’s offer.
Russia’s UN ambassador Vassily Nebenzia last week had said Moscow was still waiting for Trump to respond to Putin’s offer to voluntarily maintain the limits on deployed strategic nuclear weapons once a key arms control treaty expires.
Any agreement on continuing to limit nuclear arms would stand in contrast to rising tensions between the United States and Russia since Trump and Putin met in Alaska in mid-August given reported incursions of Russian drones into Nato airspace.
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