Ukraine's military said on Friday that it struck three facilities involved in missile production across Russia overnight, including a factory in the Tver region that makes missile components and a centre in the Nizhny Novgorod region for disassembling intercontinental ballistic missiles. Russian regional governors confirmed that drone attacks occurred at both sites, with the Nizhny Novgorod governor reporting that one serviceman was killed while repelling the attack.
What did Ukraine's military claim?
In a statement on Telegram, Ukraine's General Staff said its forces hit three facilities involved in missile production across Russia overnight, Reuters reported. The named targets were a factory in the Tver region that manufactures missile components and a Russian facility for the "liquidation of intercontinental ballistic missiles" in the Nizhny Novgorod region. The General Staff said the strikes were intended to degrade Russia's ability to source explosives and rocket fuel.
The claims describe Ukrainian action; the damage assessments are Ukraine's military's account, not independently confirmed findings.
How did Russia respond?
Russian officials confirmed that drone attacks took place at both named locations, though they gave a more limited account of the damage. The governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region said one serviceman was killed while repelling the attack and that drone debris caused "minimal" damage to infrastructure. The casualty figure comes from the regional governor; no independent confirmation was available.
The governor of the Tver region said on Friday morning that a drone attack had caused a fire at a plant in Redkino, but that the fire had been extinguished. He did not describe the plant's function.
Why does this matter?
The reported strikes mark a notable widening of Ukraine's deep-strike campaign from its usual targets — oil refineries and fuel depots — to facilities it says are directly tied to missile production. Ukraine has been hitting Russian oil refining and military production facilities with a growing fleet of domestically produced drones, and sometimes with missiles, Reuters noted, as both sides increasingly rely on long-range weapons to strike deep inside each other's territory while ground forces remain largely deadlocked.
Strikes on missile-industrial targets, if confirmed at the scale Ukraine claims, would represent an attempt to slow the production pipeline behind Russia's aerial bombardment campaign — the same campaign Ukrainian officials say has killed dozens of civilians across Ukraine in recent days.
