Russia Reports Downing 205 Drones Overnight Across Nine Regions as Sochi Airport Restricts Flights

Russia's defence ministry said air defences intercepted and destroyed 205 fixed-wing drones over nine Russian regions during the night, naming Astrakhan, Belgorod, Bryansk, Voronezh, Volgograd, Kaluga, Kursk and Rostov among them. RIA Novosti reported that 12 of those were downed over Voronezh region alone. The figures come from the ministry and have not been independently verified. Ukraine has not commented on the overnight operation.

Civil aviation absorbed the consequence. The federal air transport agency imposed temporary flight restrictions at Sochi airport and lifted earlier restrictions at Nizhny Novgorod. Restrictions of this kind now recur several times a week at airports across southern and central Russia, and each one strands aircraft and crews away from schedule.

The overnight activity follows a sustained Ukrainian campaign against Russian refining. Drones struck a major refinery roughly 800 miles from the Ukrainian border on 13 August, the fourth such strike in three days, and an earlier attack on the city of Nizhnekamsk killed 13 people including a child and wounded 75, according to authorities in Tatarstan. The strikes have reduced Russian refining throughput and produced fuel shortages at filling stations in several regions.

Russian military sources meanwhile told TASS that Ukraine is redeploying part of its main drone unit from the Pokrovsk axis to the Zaporizhzhia direction, a claim that Kyiv has not confirmed.