Russian says its forces advance in eastern Ukraine, strike military airfields

MOSCOW, July 9 (Reuters) - Russian forces advanced at key points along the front in eastern Ukraine, defeating Ukrainian units in at least six different regions, and used missiles and drones to strike ammunition depots and airfields, the defence ministry said.

Russia, which controls a chunk of Ukraine bigger than the U.S. state of Virginia, took 1,112 square km (430 square miles) of Ukrainian territory in the past two months, according to the Deep State pro-Ukrainian map.

Russia controls nearly a fifth of what is internationally recognised to be Ukraine, including all of Crimea and Luhansk, over 70% of the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, and slivers of the Kharkiv, Sumy and Dnipropetrovsk regions.

Russia's defence ministry said Russian forces had defeated Ukrainian units the Donetsk, Sumy, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and the Dnipropetrovsk regions, and captured the village of Tolstoi, in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region.

"We are advancing," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow.

Ukraine said that Russia targeted Ukraine with a record 728 drones overnight, hours after U.S. President Donald Trump pledged to send more defensive weapons to Kyiv and aimed unusually sharp criticism at Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation launched a group strike with high-precision long-range air-launched weapons, including Kinzhal hypersonic ballistic missiles and long-range unmanned aerial vehicles against the infrastructure of military airfields," Russia's defence ministry said.

Russia said the targets had all been hit. Kyiv's military said it downed almost all the Russian drones.