War

Ukraine strikes Russian 'drone port' in Bryansk Oblast, damaging storage facilities, military says

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Ukraine strikes Russian 'drone port' in Bryansk Oblast, damaging storage facilities, military says
A satellite image showing a newly-built Russian 'drone port' outside the town of Navlya in Bryansk Oblast. (Screenshot from NASA FIRMS maps)

Ukrainian forces have struck a Russian military facility used to launch long-range attack drones at Ukraine, the General Staff said on Oct. 29.

The overnight attack targeted the Russian drone base near Navlya in Bryansk Oblast, around 70 kilometers from the Ukrainian border.

According to the General Staff, the strikes damaged a storage facility for Russian long-range Geran-type drones, as well as fuel and lubricant storage facilities and the 'drone port' itself.

Ukrainian media and open-source intelligence (OSINT) groups have tracked Russia's building of several large 'airfields' designed for unmanned systems and built across Russia's western border areas.

The building of these new 'drone ports' reflects Moscow's growing investment in long-range attack drones as a long-term strategic tool, which can be used both against Ukraine or against countries on NATO's eastern flank.

The Oct. 29 attack was the second strike on the Navlya facility, with the first being on Aug. 3, also targeting launch and storage facilities.

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Francis Farrell

Senior Reporter

Francis Farrell is a senior reporter at the Kyiv Independent. He is the co-author of War Notes, the Kyiv Independent's weekly newsletter about the war. For the second year in a row, the Kyiv Independent received a grant from the Charles Douglas-Home Memorial Trust to support his front-line reporting for the year 2025-2026. Francis won the Prix Bayeux Calvados-Normandy for war correspondents in the young reporter category in 2023, and was nominated for the European Press Prize in 2024. Francis speaks Ukrainian and Hungarian and is an alumnus of Leiden University in The Hague and University College London. He has previously worked as a managing editor at the online media project Lossi 36, as a freelance journalist and documentary photographer, and at the OSCE and Council of Europe field missions in Albania and Ukraine.

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