The statement of the Russian Ministry of Defense does not specify whether there were casualties or material damage in the shooting down.
Russian air defense systems shot down eight US-made ATACMS missiles and 72 Ukrainian drones over the past 24 hours, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Saturday. TASR informs about it according to the report of the AFP agency.
In the statement, the department did not specify whether there were any casualties or material damage. ATACMS missiles, which the US allowed Ukraine to use in attacks in the interior of Russia in mid-November, have a maximum range of 300 kilometers, according to publicly available information.
Ukrainian armed forces are believed to have first attacked the Russian border area with ATACMS missiles on November 19. The Russian Ministry of Defense said at the time that the target of the attack was a military facility in the Briansk region.
Russia deployed new missiles
Russia responded to the first ATACMS missile attack by deploying what it says is a new medium-range hypersonic missile that can be equipped with nuclear warheads. At the same time, it threatened that the use of these American-made missiles delivered to Ukraine could trigger a hypersonic missile strike on the center of Kyiv.
The Russian army sent 81 drones to attack Ukraine on Saturday night. Ukraine’s air defenses shot down 34 of those drones, the remaining 47 disappeared from radar, the Ukrainian Air Force said.
On Saturday, according to the BBC, the number of victims of Friday’s Russian drone attack on Kyiv increased to two. A young girl, who was injured during it, died in hospital. Earlier it was reported that one man had died as a result of the attack. Two other injured persons are in the hospital.
