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KYIV: Ukraine said Saturday it hit military targets and a gas pipeline in drone attacks in Russia, where local authorities said three people were killed and two others wounded.

Ukraine’s SBU security service said the strikes, carried out Friday night by long-distance drones, hit a military airfield in the southwestern town of Primorsko-Akhtarsk.

They caused a fire in an areas where Iranian-built Shahed drones — relied on by Russia to attack Ukraine — were stored, the SBU said.

It said the strikes also hit a company, Elektropribor, in Russia’s southern Penza region, which it said “works for the Russian military-industrial complex,” making military digital networks, aviation devices, armored vehicles and ships.

The governor for the Penza region, Oleg Melnichenko, said on Telegram that one woman had been killed and two other people were wounded in that attack.

Russia’s defense ministry said its air-defense systems had destroyed 112 Ukrainian drones over Russian territory — 34 over the Rostov region — in a nearly nine-hour period, from Friday night to Saturday morning.

An elderly man was killed inside a house that caught fire due to falling drone debris in the Samara region, governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev posted on Telegram.

In the Rostov region, a guard at an industrial facility was killed after a drone attack and a fire in one of the site’s buildings, acting Rostov governor Yuri Sliusar said.

“The military repelled a massive air attack during the night,” destroying drones over seven districts, Sliusar posted on Telegram.

Ukraine has regularly used drones to hit targets inside Russia as it fights back against Moscow’s full-scale invasion, launched in February 2022.

Russia, too, has increasingly deployed the unmanned aerial devices as part of its offensive.

An AFP analysis published on Friday showed that Russia’s forces in July launched an unprecedented number of drones, 6,297 of them.

The figure included decoy drones sent into Ukraine’s skies in efforts to saturate the country’s air-defense systems.

In Ukraine’s central-eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, Russian drone attacks Friday night wounded three people, governor Sergiy Lysak wrote on Telegram.

Several buildings, homes and cars were damaged, he said.

Russian forces have claimed advances in Dnipropetrovsk, recently announcing the capture of two villages there, part of Moscow’s accelerated capture of territory in July, according to AFP’s analysis of data from the US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

Kyiv denies any Russian presence in the Dnipropetrovsk area.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has consistently rejected calls for a ceasefire in the more than three-year conflict, said Friday that he wanted peace but that his demands for ending Moscow’s military offensive were “unchanged.”

Those demands include that Ukraine abandon territory and end ambitions to join NATO.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, meanwhile, said only Putin could end the war and renewed his call for a meeting between the two leaders.

“The United States has proposed this. Ukraine has supported it. What is needed is Russia’s readiness,” he wrote on X.

LONDON: Pro-Palestine election candidates in the UK could unseat top government ministers at the next general election, leading pollsters have said.

Figures including Health Secretary Wes Streeting and Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood will likely face major battles to keep their seats despite Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s decision to potentially recognize a Palestinian state, .

At the last election in 2024, a pro-Palestine candidate unseated a key member of Starmer’s team, Jonathan Ashworth. Streeting retained his seat but with a tiny majority of 528, down from 5,198 in 2019.

Mounting public anger over Britain’s response to the Gaza war could cause major embarrassment for the government at the next election, pollsters say.

Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader and now independent MP, has announced a new party that could also take a chunk of votes from the government by highlighting the Gaza crisis.

John Curtice, the country’s top pollster, told The Independent that Starmer’s pledge to recognize a Palestinian state in September — should Israel fail to meet key conditions — “may not be sufficient” for voters.

Both Streeting and Mahmood are in significant danger of losing their seats at the next election, while other ministers and MPs could also fall if anger continues to grow over Gaza.

Starmer had also “lost out” on votes in his own constituency last year because of concerns over Gaza, Curtice said.

However, the prime minister’s majority is substantially larger than some of his Cabinet ministers.

“Here is somebody (Starmer) who spent a great deal of time and effort trying to reconnect with the Jewish community, and now he’s finding himself having to spend a great deal of effort trying to reconnect with the Muslim community. It is very difficult to keep himself on board with both groups at the moment,” Curtice said.

When Corbyn launched his party last week, he said its members would campaign heavily on Palestine, as well as Britain’s response to Israel’s war on Gaza.

Luke Tryl of polling firm More in Common said events in Gaza and government policy toward the war have revealed “deeper” problems within the ruling Labour Party.

“When we have done focus groups with voters in Muslim areas, particularly some of those who backed or were thinking about backing pro-Gaza independent candidates, I compared it to speaking to voters in the red wall after Brexit,” he said.

“In the sense that Brexit was the thing which caused the split, but it actually brought to the fore much deeper resentments — that they have been taken from granted, ignored, left behind by Labour … I think we’re going to see exactly the same thing with Muslim voters.”