Ukraine drone strike temporarily cuts utilities in Russia’s Voronezh, governor says

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(Reuters) -An overnight drone attack by Ukraine temporarily disrupted power and heating supplies in the southwestern Russia city of Voronezh, a regional governor said on Sunday.

The attack on Voronezh, the administrative centre of the wider Voronezh region, caused no injuries, Governor Alexander Gusev said on the Telegram messaging app.

Several drones were suppressed by electronic warfare systems, sparking a fire at a utility facility that was quickly extinguished, he added.

Safety measures led to brief changes in central heating temperatures in some homes and to short power cuts in parts of the city, but supplies later returned to normal, Gusev said.

The Russian defence ministry did not mention any drones downed over the Voronezh region in its daily Telegram update on Sunday. The ministry reports how many drones its units destroy, not how many Ukraine launches.

The ministry said a total of 44 Ukrainian drones were destroyed or intercepted overnight, including 43 over the border region of Bryansk and one over the Rostov region in southern Russia.

There was no immediate comment from Ukraine.

Ukraine has stepped up long-range drone and missile strikes inside Russia, hitting oil refineries, depots and logistics hubs it says feed the Kremlin’s war machine.

Moscow calls the attacks terrorism, while Ukraine says they are legitimate acts of self-defence in the war that Russia launched with its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Editing by William Mallard and Raju Gopalakrishnan)