Russia’s major drone and missile attack causes damage in Kyiv and Kropyvnytskyi. Russia captures Zvirove, stages attacks from there into Pokrovsk. Russia’s Aeroflot cancels flights after pro-Ukraine hackers claim a cyber-attack.
Russia’s major drone and missile attack causes damage in Kyiv, Kropyvnytskyi
Russia carried out a mass missile and drone attack on Ukraine overnight into Monday, causing destruction in Kyiv and Kropyvnytskyi.
Ukraine’s Air Force said Russia had launched 324 drones and seven missiles toward Ukraine, including three Kh-47M2 Kinzhal ballistic missiles and four Kh-101 cruise missiles. Ukraine’s air defenses shot down or otherwise neutralized 309 drones and two Kh-101 cruise missiles. The Kinzhal missiles did not reach their target, the Air Force said.
The main target for the attack was the city of Starokostyantyniv in the region of Khmelnytskyi.
A drone attack on Kyiv damaged a multi-story apartment building in the Darnytskyi district. The shock wave shattered windows between the sixth and 11th floors. At least five people, including a two-year-old child, were injured by debris and taken to hospital.
In Kropyvnytskyi, Russia’s drones damaged the Philharmonic Theatre, a university and a firefighting station. The firefighters took shelter during the attack. There were no casualties.
Russia captures Zvirove, stages attacks from there into Pokrovsk
Russian forces have likely entered the village of Zvirove, which is in the southern suburbs of the city of Pokrovsk, in Donetsk region, and are trying to enter Pokrovsk in small groups, military observer, coordinator of the Information Resistance initiative, Kostyantyn Mashovets said on Monday in a post to Facebook. At the same time, the Russians continue with a plan to envelop Pokrovsk in pincers in order to cut off the Ukrainian supply lines to the city. Russia has considerably advanced on the north-eastern flank, Mashovets said. If it does not decrease the tempo of its offensive operations, “the fate of Pokrovsk is sealed,” he added.
Russian forces are piling pressure on Ukrainian troops in the north, north-east and north-west in order to close in on the area from the flanks and capture the Pokrovsk-Myrnohrad agglomeration. They are also conducting frontal assaults from the south toward the city of Pokrovsk to pin the Ukrainian reserves.
According to Mashovets, while it took the entire spring and most of the summer for Russia to advance, it has achieved its goals only partially.
South-west of Pokrovsk, Russian forces have cut a section of the Pokrovsk-Mezhova road between Udachne and Kotlyne after three months of incessant fighting, which aimed at fully capturing the towns.
“The situation can sharply escalate if the 51st Combined Arms Army breaks through into Dobropillya (and it has the chances to do so, given the tempo of advance of its frontline units in this direction). In this case, the Ukrainian Armed Forces will face the problems of operational scale, including on the Kramatorsk axis,” he explained.
Russia has deployed around 110,000-112,000 troops to the Pokrovsk direction, the analyst said. They are thought to have 500-520 tanks, 680-700 armored fighting vehicles, up to 560-565 tube artillery pieces, including 120-mm mortars, and more than 180 multiple launch rocket systems of all calibers. Russia’s Central Grouping of Forces fighting in the Pokrovsk direction is likely its most powerful unit, Mashovets added.
Russia’s Aeroflot cancels flights after pro-Ukraine hackers claim cyber-attack
The Russian airline Aeroflot was forced to cancel more than 40 flights on Monday after a failure in its information systems. A pro-Ukraine hacking group called Silent Crow said it had carried out a cyber-attack on the company with a Belarusian Cyber Partisans group.
The airline said it had cancelled flights to Minsk, Yekaterinburg, Kaliningrad, Saint-Petersburg etc.
The statements from Silent Crow and Belarusian Cyber Partisans posted to Telegram said that their “prolonged and large-scale operation… completely destroyed” Aeroflot’s IT systems. The cyberattack was the result of a year-long operation which had deeply penetrated the company’s network, destroyed 7,000 servers and gained control over the personal computers of employees, including senior managers.
The hackers said they were able to obtain and download Aeroflot’s entire array of flight history databases and compromise all critical corporate systems.
They also gained control over the personal computers of employees, including senior managers.
Silent Crow claimed it had copied Aeroflot’s customer and internal data, including audio recordings of phone calls, data from the company’s own surveillance on employees and other intercepted communications.
The hackers have managed to obtain 12 terabytes of databases, eight terabytes of files in Windows Share and two terabytes of corporate e-mails.
“All of these resources are now inaccessible or destroyed and restoring them will possibly require tens of millions of dollars. The damage is strategic,” Silent Crow wrote on Telegram.
The group said it will begin sharing the data it had seized in the coming days. “We did not just destroy the infrastructure, we left a trace,” it added.
