ROSTOV-ON-DON, Aug. 13 -- By the time Yury Slyusar, governor of Russia's Rostov Region, published his overnight report on Thursday morning, the fires were already out. The figure that led his statement - approximately 90 unmanned aerial vehicles shot down while repelling a nighttime air attack - told one side of the story. The two fires the attack produced on the ground told another.

Dry vegetation caught fire in the village of Nizhnyaya Kovaleva in the Krasnosulinsky District. A second blaze ignited in the courtyard of a school in the village of Volchensky in the Kamensky District, damaging several windows of the school building. Both fires were quickly extinguished, Slyusar wrote on the messaging platform Max. "Overall, some 90 UAVs we...