Isabel van Brugen
Adrone attack on an industrial site in Russia's republic of Tatarstan, located more than 1,000 kilometers from the Ukrainian border, is reported to have struck a plant that produces Shahed kamikaze drones.
"Drone attacks took place against factories in Tatarstan at Yelabuga and Nizhnekamsk," the press service of the head of Tatarstan, Rustam Minnikhanov, said on Telegram on Tuesday.
The message said the strikes "did not cause serious damage and work at the factories was not affected." It added: "Unfortunately in Yelabuga, people were wounded."
A video shared by Russian Telegram channels on Tuesday appeared to show the moment a drone struck a site in Yelabuga, causing a huge fireball.
Russian state-run news agency Tass said six people were wounded, including two teenagers.
"In Yelabuga, Russia-occupied Tatarstan, a strange explosion took place today," Sergej Sumlenny, founder of the German think tank, the European Resilience Initiative Center, said on X, formerly known as Twitter, of the strikes. "Yelabuga is 1200 km from Ukraine, and is a home of a 'high-tech zone', reportedly drones production too."
Anton Gerashchenko, a former adviser to Ukraine's minister of internal affairs, shared footage of the strike on X, saying the area where it occurred houses "an assembly plant for the production of Iranian Shahed drones."
Ukraine hasn't claimed responsibility for the attacks, in line with its usual policy of refraining from commenting on strikes that take place on Russian soil. However, Ukraine's Minister of Digital Transformation Mikhail Fedorov said in an interview with Die Welt, published on Monday, that Kyiv has drones capable of striking targets more than 1,000 kilometers away.
"Most of the drones that attacked Russian oil refineries have a range of 700 to 1,000 kilometers, but now there are models that can fly more than 1,000 kilometers," Fedorov said.
Independent Russian news outlet the Moscow Times reported that Russia began producing Iranian-designed Shahed drones—which Moscow uses extensively in the war in Ukraine—at a plant in Tatarstan last year. Some 200 were produced there per month last fall, it said.
The remains of a Shahed 136 drone are seen in Kyiv, Ukraine, on May 12, 2023. An attack on industrial sites in the Russian republic of Tatarstan is reported to have struck a plant that produces Shahed drones.
In December, Ukraine said Russia had launched more than 3,700 Shahed drones into Ukraine in the previous 22 months.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said Russia intends to "exhaust" his country with attacks using the UAVs. Russia was first reported to have used the drones on September 13, 2022, and has deployed them to attack Ukraine's capital Kyiv, and critical infrastructure nationwide.
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