Ukrainian missile attack on a Russian city kills at least 14 people
The Russian authorities said Saturday that a Ukrainian attack on the city of Belgorod, near the border with Ukraine, had killed at least 14 people and injured more than 100 others, in what appeared to be the deadliest attack on Russian territory since the war began.
The Russian Ministry of Defense said in a statement that Ukraine had hit Belgorod with two rockets and several rockets filled with cluster munitions, adding that the attack was “indiscriminate” and “would not go unpunished.”
The ministry said most of the rockets had been shot down, but parts of the rubble had fallen on the city. Ukrainian authorities did not immediately comment on the attack and Russian claims could not immediately be verified.
Vyacheslav Gladkov, the governor of the Belgorod region, said that a residential area of the city had been hit, and he urged all residents to move to bomb shelters. The Russian Foreign Ministry said it had requested an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss the attack, according to RIA Novosti, a Russian state news agency.
Unverified images about the aftermath of the bombing, published by Belgorod residents and broadcast by Russian state television, showed cars on fire in the streets and huge plumes of smoke rising from buildings in the city.
Saturday’s attack could be a response to Friday’s Russian airstrike on Ukraine, one of the largest of the war, which killed at least 39 people, injured around 160 others and hit civilian and military infrastructure. Multiple Ukrainian news broadcasts quoted unnamed Ukrainian security and military officials who took responsibility for the attack on Belgorod, portraying it as a response to the Russian barrage.
Ukraine has repeatedly said it is not afraid to take the war into Russian territory, and has previously attacked the Belgorod region with cross-border attacks and even brief ground assaults by Kiev-backed, anti-Kremlin Russian fighters.
So far, such attacks have resulted in at least 50 deaths in Russia, according to the UN, as well as the evacuation of a few thousand civilians and minor clashes with the Russian army. Although the details of Saturday’s attack were not immediately clear, the death toll alone made the attack remarkable, shattering the sense of relative normalcy that had prevailed in Russia despite the war and inflicting on Russia the kind of suffering that Ukrainians face on an almost daily basis have had to endure. for almost two years.