Shelling in the center of the Russian border city of Belgorod killed 14 people, including two children, and injured 108 others on Saturday, Russia's Emergency Situations Ministry said. Russian officials accused Kyiv of carrying out the attack, which took place the day after an 18-hour aerial bombardment across Ukraine killed at least 39 civilians. Images of Belgorod on social media showed burning cars and plumes of black smoke rising among damaged buildings as air raid sirens sounded, the AP reports. One strike hit close to a public ice rink in the heart of the city.
Russia's Defense Ministry said it identified the ammunition used in the strike as Czech-made Vampire rockets and Olkha cluster munitions. It provided no additional information, and the AP was unable to verify its claims. "This crime will not go unpunished," the ministry said in a statement on social media. The Kremlin said that Russian President Vladimir Putin had been briefed on the situation, and that the country's health minister, Mikhail Murashko, was ordered to join a delegation of medical personnel and rescue workers traveling to Belgorod from Moscow. Earlier on Saturday, Moscow officials had reported shooting down 32 Ukrainian drones over the country's Moscow, Bryansk, Oryol, and Kursk regions.
They also reported that cross-border shelling had killed two other people in Russia. A man died and four other people were injured when a missile struck a private home in the Belgorod region late Friday evening, and a 9-year-old was killed in a separate incident in the Bryansk region. Russian drone strikes against Ukraine continued Saturday, per the AP, with the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces reporting that 10 Iranian-made Shahed drones had been shot down across the Kherson, Khmelnytskyi, and Mykolaiv regions. Shelling killed a 43-year-old man in Stepnohirsk, a town in Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia region, Gov. Yuriy Malashko said on social media.
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