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Ukraine downs 28 out of 31 Russian drones

Technical facilities in Odesa port damaged
REUTERS, Kyiv
Russia launched 31 drones and 2 missiles at Ukraine overnight, mostly targeting the south of the country, with air defences destroying 28 drones and both missiles, the Ukrainian military said yesterday.
“As a result of air combat, the Ukrainian Air Force and defence forces destroyed 28 Shahed attack drones in Odesa, Kherson, Mykolaiv, Donetsk, Kirovohrad and Khmelnytskyi regions,” Ukraine’s Air Forces said on the Telegram messaging app.
The drones were launched from Russian-occupied Crimea, it said.
The military said debris from the downed drones damaged technical facilities in the Odesa port as well as “an inoperable administrative building and a warehouse”.
In Kherson region, a fire broke out in a warehouse, the military said. “No people were injured,” the military added.
The military also repeated previously issued information that two Russian military aircraft were downed near the Russian-occupied city of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov in southern Ukraine and near occupied Donetsk city in eastern Ukraine.
On Sunday, Russian and Ukrainian military officials both reported downing enemy aircraft in different areas of the 1,000-km-long (621-mile) front of their 22-month-old war.
Meanwhile, a top Russian minister said yesterday Russia has the upper hand in weapons production over the West and intends to keep the rate of growth high, after both the West and Russia ramped up arms production for the Ukraine war.
“I don’t want to boast, but I can say that we began to gain and picked up the pace of production earlier than Western countries,” Denis Manturov, the deputy prime minister who oversees arms production, told the RIA news agency.
“Another question is how long this race will last,” Manturov said, adding that a 2025-2034 armament plan was due to be approved next year.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, have said that production of artillery, drones, tanks and armoured vehicles is soaring.
Some former leaders of the West have spoken about a new Cold War between Russia and China on one side and the United States and its allies on the other, though Russia’s $2 trillion economy would find it hard to counter the entire might of the West alone for long.
According to IMF data, the United States’ nominal gross domestic product was $27 trillion this year while China’s was $17.7 trillion.
In a separate development, Ukraine received $1.34 billion under the World Bank’s public expenditures for administrative capacity endurance in Ukraine, the Ukrainian finance ministry said yesterday.
The ministry said in a statement the financing consisted of a $1.086 billion loan from the World Bank, $190 million grant from Norway, $50 million grant from the United States and $20 million grant from Switzerland.
The ministry said the funds would be used to partially compensate for non-security and defence-related expenditures of the Ukrainian state budget, including old-age social payments and payments to employees of the state emergency service.
“International financial assistance is a significant contribution to maintaining Ukraine’s financial and economic stability and allows us to provide priority social expenditures during the war,” Ukraine’s finance minister Serhiy Marchenko said.