Putin Says Russia Must Boost Air Defense Capacity.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia needs greater air defense capacity to deal with Ukrainian drone attacks on oil infrastructure, but added that the country is successfully coping with the consequences of those strikes, Reuters reported.

In an interview with Pavel Zarubin, a journalist from Russian state television channel Rossiya-1, Putin said Russia now needs above all to increase the production and delivery of air defense systems, while continuously improving them in line with current realities. He added that Russia has all these systems, but the issue is the speed of increasing production and delivering them to the troops or for the protection of critical infrastructure sites.

Putin noted that Russia would not allow Ukrainian strikes to divert it from its plans for an offensive along the front line. All these strikes, regardless of where they hit our infrastructure, in no way affect the situation at the front, along the line of combat contact, he said.

The Russian president acknowledged that there was a certain fuel shortage caused by Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil infrastructure, through which Kyiv seeks to weaken Moscow’s war effort, Agence France-Presse noted.

Putin assured that Crimea’s fuel needs would be fully covered and that the peninsula currently has supplies for several days. He said the authorities’ primary task is to increase air defense capacity and ensure fuel supplies, including for Crimea.