Ukraine conducted a drone attack on Russia's Marinovka military airfield in the southern Russian region of Volgograd, striking a storage site for fuel and glide bombs, a security source in Kyiv said yesterday.

The Russian governor of the Volgograd region said earlier that a fire had broken out at a military facility in the region after a Ukrainian drone crashed into it. The official, Andrei Bocharov, said there had been no casualties.

The source said the attack was part of a campaign of Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian airfields that are used by warplanes to conduct regular attacks on targets in Ukraine.

Apart from missile strikes, Ukraine has in particular flagged Russia's use of cheaply-produced glide bombs fired by warplanes as a menace to Ukrainian positions in the east, as well as cities and towns that have been struck by them.

Even after the delivery of a small group of US-made F-16 fighter jets, the Ukrainian air force is outgunned by Russia's much larger and well-armed fleet of warplanes.

Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The source said the drone attack was a joint operation conducted by the Security Service of Ukraine and the country's special forces.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday accused Ukraine of trying to strike Russia's Kursk nuclear power plant in an overnight attack and said Moscow had informed the UN nuclear safety watchdog about the situation.

Acting Kursk Governor Alexei Smirnov told Putin that the situation at the Kursk plant, which has four Soviet graphite-moderated RBMK-1000 reactors, was "stable".

"The enemy tried to strike at the nuclear power plant during the night today," Putin told a meeting of senior officials about the situation in Russian border regions.

"The International Atomic Energy Agency has been informed, they promise to come themselves and send specialists to assess the situation," Putin said.

He did not provide further details about the incident or provide documentary evidence to back up his assertion. There was no immediate comment from Ukraine and Reuters was unable to independently confirm the attack.