Celebrations honouring navy scaled down as Ukraine launches drone attacks

ST PETERSBURG (AP):

Russia, on Sunday, scaled down the festivities honouring its navy, citing security concerns as continuing Ukrainian drone attacks posed a challenge to the Kremlin.

Russian authorities cancelled the parades of warships in St Petersburg, in the Kaliningrad region on the Baltic and in the far-eastern port of Vladivostok that are usually held to mark the annual Navy Day celebrations.

Asked about the reason for the cancellation of the parade in St Petersburg even as President Vladimir Putin arrived in his home city to visit the navy headquarters, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that “it’s linked to the overall situation, security reasons, which are above all else”.

The Russian Defence Ministry said that air defences downed 99 Ukrainian drones over several regions overnight. Later in the day, officials reported more drones shot down near St Petersburg. A woman was injured by drone fragments in the Lomonosov region, according to the local authorities.

St Petersburg’s Pulkovo airport suspended dozens of flights early Sunday because of the drone threat.

On a trip to St Petersburg, Putin visited the historic Admiralty building to receive reports on four-day naval manoeuvres that wrapped up Sunday. The July Storm exercise involved 150 warships from the Baltics to the Pacific.

Putin vowed to build more warships and intensify the navy’s training, adding that “the navy’s strike power and combat capability will rise to a qualitatively new level”.

Reducing the scale of the Navy Day celebrations reflects Moscow’s worries about Ukraine’s sweeping drone attacks across the country.

In a series of strikes earlier in the war now in its fourth year, Ukraine sank several Russian warships in the Black Sea, crippling Moscow’s naval capability and forcing it to redeploy its fleet from Russia-occupied Crimea to Novorossiysk.

And, in an audacious June 1 attack codenamed ‘Spiderweb’, Ukraine used drones to hit several Russian airbases hosting long-range bombers across Russia, from the Arctic Kola Peninsula to Siberia. The drones were launched from trucks covertly placed near the bases, taking the Russian military by surprise in a humiliating blow to the Kremlin.

The raid destroyed or damaged many of the bombers that had been used by Moscow to launch aerial attacks on Ukraine, providing a major morale boost for Kyiv at a time when their undermanned and undergunned forces are facing Russian attacks along the 1,000-kilometre (600-mile) front line.