Drone hits residential building in Russia near border amid surge in Ukraine fighting

KYIV, Ukraine - A drone crashed into a high-rise residential building in southwestern Russia near the border with Ukraine, a regional governor said Friday, exposing the vulnerabilities in the country's air defense systems as President Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine increasingly affects Russian soil.

The latest drone attack to target Russian cities in recent weeks wounded three people and came amid a front-line push by Ukrainian forces in what appears to be the early stages of a long-awaited counteroffensive in pockets of southern and eastern Ukraine that Russia invaded more than 15 months ago.

The Ukrainian presidency's website posted a video statement overnight from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that alluded to the latest efforts of his country's forces to drive out the Russian invaders along various parts of the more than 1,000-kilometer (about 620-mile) front line.

Speaking inside what appeared to be a train car after visiting flood-hit southern Ukraine on Thursday, Zelenskyy said it was "not time" yet to talk about the details of the fighting. He said he was in touch with Ukrainian forces "in all the hottest areas" and praised an unspecified "result" from their efforts.

Ukrainian officials have kept generally quiet about their latest military moves, refusing to join in on rising commentary from Western military experts and others that the counteroffensive - critical for Ukraine's Western-funded military effort - was underway.

Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said Friday that Russia was engaged in defensive fighting in southeastern Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia province, though she said the epicenter of the fighting remained in the east, particularly in the Donetsk region. She described the ongoing clashes in the towns and cities of Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and Marinka as "heavy battles."

Valerii Shershen, a spokesperson for Ukraine's armed forces in the Tavriia area of Zaporizhzhia province, said Ukraine's army has been actively searching for weaknesses in Russia's defense.

"There is a certain level of activity and dynamism as we explore options to shift from positional defense to launching an attack," Shershen told U.S.-funded broadcaster Radio Liberty. He said Russian forces were strengthening their defensive lines by deploying mines, constructing fortifications, and regrouping.

In a Telegram post Friday, the governor of Russia's Voronezh region, Alexander Gusev, said the drone attack injured three residents who were hurt by shards of glass from broken windows in the city of Voronezh.

Russian state media published photos showing a high-rise apartment building with some windows blown out and damage to the facade.

Gusev said the drone was targeting a nearby airbase but veered off course after its signal was electronically jammed. The city lies some 250 kilometers (155 miles) north of Ukraine's Luhansk region, most of which is occupied by Russia.

Separately, Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov of the neighboring Belgorod region, which also borders Ukraine, said on Telegram that air defenses had shot down two unspecified targets overnight. An apartment building and private homes were damaged, he said, without saying by what.

Gladkov said a drone fell Friday on the roof of an office building in the city of Belgorod. It failed to detonate but caught fire on impact, causing "insignificant damage" and no casualties, he wrote.

The leader of a third region of Russia, Kursk Gov. Roman Starovoit, wrote on the social media app that a drone crashed to the ground outside an oil depot and near water reservoirs in the local capital, causing no casualties or damage.

Ukrainian authorities have generally also denied any role in attacks inside Russia. Such drone strikes - there was even one near the Kremlin - along with cross-border raids in southwestern Russia have brought the war home to Russians.

In Ukraine, the governor of the Kherson region, Oleksandr Prokudin, said Friday that water levels had decreased by about 20 centimeters (about 8 inches) overnight on the western bank of the Dnieper River, which was inundated starting Tuesday after a breach of the Nova Kakhovka dam upstream. The lower part of the river runs along the front line between Russian and Ukrainian forces.

Officials on both sides gave figures that indicated about 20 people have died in connection with the flooding, which has added more misery to the lives of Ukrainians.

Kyiv accused Russia of blowing up the dam and its hydropower plant, which Russian forces controlled, while Moscow said Ukraine bombarded it.

Presenting evidence that might help resolve the conflicting accounts, the Norwegian earthquake center NORSAR said Friday that a seismological station in neighboring Romania recorded tremors in the vicinity of the dam at 2:54 a.m. Tuesday, around the time that Zelenskyy said the breach occurred.

"What we can see from our data is that there was an explosion in the area of the dam as the same time as the dam broke," NORSAR head of research Volker Oye told The Associated Press.

The Norwegian center is part of global monitoring system that helps verify compliance with the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, helping to analyze seismic data from monitoring stations to detect possible nuclear explosions.

Local authorities continued to cope with the fallout Friday, even as experts predicted the consequences would last for months. The continued fighting in the region was bound to slow any recovery efforts.

Viktor Vitovetskyi, a representative of Ukraine's Emergency Service, said 46 municipalities in the Kherson region have flooded, 14 of them along the Russian-occupied eastern bank of the Dnieper River.

Even as efforts to rescue civilians and supply them with fresh water and other services, Russian shelling over the last day killed two civilians and injured 17 in the region, according to the governor.

In other developments Friday:

Kozlowska reported from London. Jon Gambrell in Kyiv, Ukraine; Hanna Arhirova in Warsaw, Poland; and David Keyton in Stockholm, Sweden contributed to this report.

Follow AP's coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine