Hundreds of Ukrainian drones struck Novorossiysk, Anapa, Gelendzhik and the Temryuk region overnight, Krasnodar region Gov. Veniamin Kondratyev said, putting four places on the Black Sea coast into the same attack window at once. He did not say how much damage was done or whether anyone was hurt.
The timing made the strike harder to ignore. On Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin was on the Varyag missile cruiser of the Pacific Fleet near Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk on Sakhalin Island, watching a military exercise and meeting navy officers with Pacific Fleet Commander-in-Chief Admiral Viktor Liina. At the same time, Russian attacks were hitting Ukraine, including a shopping mall in Zaporizhzhia and an apartment fire on the fifth floor of a residential building in Odesa.
Kondratyev's statement is the clearest public account of the overnight assault and the broadest list of places named in it. Novorossiysk, Anapa, Gelendzhik and the Temryuk region are different points in the same region, which suggests a wider drone wave rather than a single isolated hit, even as the official account leaves the extent of the damage unstated.
That gap matters because the strike was described in the middle of a day already marked by reciprocal attacks. The Russian side tied its own military activity to the Pacific Fleet and to Putin's appearance on the Varyag, while the overnight drone wave on the Krasnodar coast and the attacks on Zaporizhzhia and Odesa showed the fighting moving in both directions at once. What remains unknown is whether the overnight drones caused only disruption or something more serious in the Krasnodar region.
