– An important day. I am grateful to our soldiers who destroyed three Russian Sukhoi planes at the same time, says Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in his daily speech.
He adds that it is the anti-aircraft robot brigade in Odessa that was responsible for the feat.
– May all Russian pilots be aware of our response to all Russian murderers – no one will go unpunished, he says.
The Kremlin has not commented on the matter, but Russian war bloggers write about losses and that they can probably be explained by Ukraine shooting down the plane with the American Patriot air defense system.
If the reports, which have not been confirmed by independent sources, are correct, it is one of the biggest losses in a single day for the Russian air force since the start of the large-scale invasion. Russian bombers have intensively attacked the bridgehead that Ukrainian forces managed to secure on the eastern side of the Dnieper earlier in the fall.
According to the spokesperson Oleksiy Danilov, Ukraine has planned some kind of ambush against the planes.
– Now we can reveal a little secret; the hunt for them has lasted a long time, he told Ukrainian radio, according to the state news agency Ukrainian form.