Long-range Ukrainian attacks hit targets deep inside Russia on Wednesday. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, said Ukrainian FP-5 Flamingo long-range missiles hit a military factory in Cheboksary that supplies components for Russian drones and missiles. It is located in the Chuvashiya region more than 900km (560 miles) from the frontline. The Astra online news outlet reported that the Ukrainian strike hit the VNIIR-Progress plant that produces antennas for drones. Oleg Nikolayev, the head of Chuvashiya, confirmed the attack.
Zelenskyy said Ukrainian forces also struck a refinery in Russia’s Samara region, where the governor, Vyacheslav Fedorishchev, confirmed industrial plants were damaged by drone strikes and three people were injured. Astra carried images of a large fire at the Samara refinery. It matches with reporting by Reuters citing industry sources who said Russian oil producer Rosneft’s Kuibyshev refinery in Samara halted oil processing on 10 June after a drone attack.
Kuibyshev refinery is part of Rosneft’s Samara refining hub, which also includes Novokuibyshevsk and Syzran plants. Syzran has been offline since 21 May after a drone attack. Novokuibyshevsk had to shut down on 18 April after a drone attack and has been running at reduced throughput. Zelenskyy said Ukraine’s SBU security service also targeted two oil infrastructure facilities in Russia’s Vladimir region, about 700km from the frontline. And a fire broke out in the area surrounding Russia’s Afipsky refinery in southern Krasnodar, with a gas pipeline also damaged, Russian authorities said.
Zelenskyy declared Thursday 11 June 2026 the inaugural “Day of the Unmanned Systems Forces” – to be celebrated annually in a show of “respect and gratitude” to the Ukrainian military’s drone branch. “For the first time in the world, such a branch of the military was created, in Ukraine,” said Zelenskyy. “We are developing the USF to the max, and it is Ukrainians who have proved that through technology, ingenuity, and courage, we can change the nature of warfare.”
Russian investigators said on Wednesday that they had arrested at least two suspects after two car bombings in Moscow. Pjotr Sauer writes that one explosion killed Col Damir Davydov, 57, head of the Russian military’s artillery and missile ammunition supply directorate, which oversees the distribution of weapons to the armed forces. The bomb under his BMW went off at about 5.30am on Tuesday in the city of Balashikha, the independent outlet Astra reported. Another bomb was found before it went off and in that case a boy and a girl in their teens had been charged, said Russia’s state investigative committee. The alleged target was an employee of a scientific production enterprise.
Ukrainian forces struck the Russian-occupied port of Mariupol, Kyiv said on Wednesday, the latest in a series of drone attacks on logistics across a critical stretch of Moscow-held southern Ukraine connecting Russia to Crimea. The attack on the port, which Ukraine’s military said plunged the site into a blackout, followed two strikes earlier this week on the Chonhar bridge linking the Russian-occupied Kherson region to the Black Sea peninsula, which Moscow seized in 2014. Vladimir Saldo, the Russian-installed governor of the occupied part of Ukraine’s Kherson region, said the bridge had been hit twice and traffic had been suspended.
Ukraine’s military struck the “shadow fleet” tanker West Horizon in the Black Sea, the Ukrainian general staff said on Wednesday. Russia meanwhile condemned a European Union decision to authorise EU military vessels in the Mediterranean to stop and inspect foreign ships suspected of being part of the fleet, which transports Russian oil in breach of sanctions. The EU said it had expanded the mandate of the naval mission known as Operation IRINI.
Intensified Russian attacks on Ukraine’s Black Sea ports have caused serious damage that threatens a significant reduction in shipments including agricultural exports, said Ukraine’s largest farmers’ union, UAC. All iron ore and more than 90% of Ukraine’s agricultural exports are shipped through the three ports of the Odesa hub. “The situation at ports in the Odesa region has reached a critical point,” said a UAC statement, warning that Russian shelling was “destroying Ukraine’s logistical heart”.
Ukraine’s police chief has accused Russia of recruiting teenage Ukrainian girls to kill Ukrainian military personnel, after the arrest of a 17-year-old suspect for murder. Ivan Vyhivskyi said the young women allegedly lured Ukrainian military personnel to rented apartments and poisoned their drinks with methadone. Police detained a 17-year-old woman in the western region of Zhytomyr last week after a fatal poisoning and said she had been communicating via Telegram with a man who was likely a Russian security services agent. She had received a parcel of what presumed was methadone, a synthetic opioid, police said.
Russian MPs on Wednesday voted in favour of a law that enables Vladimir Putin’s government to increase spending and debt without going through parliament. Russia’s financial position has been deteriorating, with the government forced to raise value-added tax this year to cope with rising military spending. Putin has proclaimed Russia’s economic situation to be “under control”.
Putin, the Russian ruler, told top officials on Wednesday that there are grounds to expect a cut in the central bank’s key interest rate when it meets next week. The central bank chief, Elvira Nabiullina, was absent from the meeting, purportedly due to illness. Concerns have been raised about Nabiullina’s absence – she was last seen in public during Putin’s visit to Kazakhstan on 28 May, and missed his drone-affected “Russian Davos” summit in St Petersburg altogether.
China has complained as the European Union prepares further measures targeting Chinese firms for their alleged support for Russia’s war effort. Officials told AFP the measures would include adding 14 companies from mainland China and Hong Kong to a list of firms banned from buying EU goods. Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said that Beijing “has always firmly opposed illegal unilateral sanctions that lack basis in international law.” China would “closely follow” developments and “take necessary measures to resolutely safeguard its legitimate rights and interests”.