Ukraine drone targets second Russian long-range military radar, Kyiv source says

KYIV (Reuters) -A Ukrainian drone targeted a long-range radar deep inside Russia on Sunday, the second such strike in a week on infrastructure used by Moscow to monitor Ukraine’s military activities, a Kyiv intelligence source said.

The source said the strike was aimed at a “Voronezh M” radar near the city of Orsk in the Orenburg region some 1,500 km from the closest territory held by Kyiv’s forces.

The source, who declined to be named, did not say if there was any damage, but the move would make it one of the deepest attempted drone strikes in Russian territory since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

There was no immediate comment from Moscow on the matter, although Russia’s Izvestia newspaper and other media outlets reported that a drone had come down in the Orenburg region on Sunday and that no civilian infrastructure had been hit.

The Kyiv source also confirmed reports of an earlier Ukrainian drone attack on a “Voronezh-DM” radar in southern Krasnodar region on May 22.

The Russian service of U.S. media outlet RFE/RL cited satellite imagery showing damage at the Voronezh-DM radar site in Krasnodar region. Reuters has not independently verified the imagery.

Thord Are Iversen, an independent defenсe analyst and former Norwegian Navy officer, said the radars were part of Russia’s ballistic missile early warning system. Russia is a major nuclear power.

Their primary function, he told Reuters, was to detect and track intercontinental ballistic missiles and to determine if Russia was under nuclear attack. They also have secondary roles such as space tracking.

Asked why the radars were targeted, the Kyiv source said: “They monitor the actions of the Ukrainian security and defence forces in the south of Ukraine.”

With Russia’s invasion now in its third year, Kyiv has increasingly relied on long-range drones to target Russian military and energy targets, in particular oil refineries, in recent months.

Russia has pounded Ukraine with long-range strikes throughout the war and renewed its aerial assault on the energy system, in what it says is retaliation for Kyiv’s strikes on targets in Russia.

A Ukrainian media outlet cited an unnamed source saying the drone had flown 1,800 km (1,118 miles) in Sunday’s attack.

Earlier this month Ukrainian intelligence source said that Kyiv’s longest-range drone attack to date had targeted an oil processing plant in Russia’s Bashkiria region at a range of 1,500 km.

(Reporting by Tom Balmforth; Writing by Anastasiia Malenko; Editing by Alison Williams, Gareth Jones and Hugh Lawson)