KYIV, Aug 6 (Reuters) - Ukraine is seeing "significant results" from US and German air defence systems, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Sunday (Aug 6), despite waves of Russian air strikes that Kyiv says targeted civilians and residential buildings.
Russia reported it had shot down a drone heading for Moscow in the third such attack in a week, while officials on both sides said Ukraine had struck two bridges linking Crimea to the mainland.
Both countries have stepped up attacks on each other's troops, weaponry and infrastructure supporting the war as Ukraine seeks to dislodge Russian forces that have dug in across southern and eastern Ukraine since their invasion last year.
The Moscow-appointed head of Crimea said the Chonhar bridge to the peninsula, which was annexed from Ukraine by Moscow in 2014, had been damaged by a missile strike. Another of the three road links between Crimea and Russian-occupied parts of mainland Ukraine, near the town of Henichesk, was shelled and a civilian driver wounded, a Moscow-appointed official said.
In his nightly video address on Sunday, Zelenskyy said advanced air defence systems, including the US-built Patriot and Germany's IRIS-T, were proving "highly effective" and had "already yielded significant results."
Zelenskyy said Ukraine had shot down a significant part of Russia's attacks over the past week, which included 65 missiles of various kinds and 178 assault drones, including 87 Shaheds.
Ukraine's military said later that Russia had launched 30 missiles and 48 air strikes.
"Unfortunately, there are casualties and wounded among the civilian population. Residential buildings and other civilian infrastructure suffered destruction," the military said in a statement.
The attacks followed what Zelenskyy said was a bomb attack late on Saturday on a blood transfusion centre in the town of Kupiansk, around 16km from the front in the eastern Kharkiv region. He described the strike as a war crime. Reuters could not immediately verify the report.
Russia denies deliberately targeting civilians or military hospitals in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which has killed thousands of people, uprooted millions and destroyed cities.
