Shelling in Russian border city kills 10 and injures 45
Shelling in the centre of the Russian border city of Belgorod killed 10 people and injured 45 more on Saturday, emergency services said.
Russian officials accused Kyiv of carrying out the attack, which took place the day after an 18-hour aerial Russian barrage across Ukraine killed at least 39 civilians.
Images of Belgorod on social media showed cars set alight and plumes of black smoke rising among damaged buildings as air raid sirens sounded. One strike hit close to a public ice rink in the heart of the city.
Earlier on Saturday, Moscow officials reported shooting down 32 Ukrainian drones over the 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 on Friday evening and a nine-year-old was killed in a separate incident in the Bryansk region.
Russian drone strikes against Ukraine also continued, 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 on Saturday.
Cities across western Russia have come under regular attack from drones since May, with officials blaming Kyiv. Ukrainian officials never acknowledge responsibility for attacks on Russian territory or the Crimean peninsula. However, larger aerial strikes against Russia have previously followed heavy assaults on Ukrainian cities.
On Friday, Moscow’s forces launched 122 missiles and dozens of drones across Ukraine, an onslaught described by one air force official as the biggest aerial barrage of the war.
At least 39 people were killed and another 144 people were wounded and an unknown number were buried under rubble in the assault, which damaged a maternity hospital, apartment blocks, and schools.
Shelling continued through the day across eastern and southern Ukraine and in Russia’s border regions. One man was killed by a missile in a private home in Russia’s Belgorod region late on Friday evening, regional head Vyacheslav Gladkov wrote on social media. A further four people were injured, including a 10-year-old child, he said.
Western officials and analysts recently warned that Russia limited its cruise missile strikes for months in an apparent effort to build up stockpiles for massive strikes during the winter, hoping to break the Ukrainians’ spirit.
Fighting along the frontline is largely bogged down by winter weather after Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive failed to make a significant breakthrough along the roughly 1,000-km (620-mile) line of contact.
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Russia’s aerial attacks have also sparked concern for Ukraine’s neighbours.
Poland’s defence forces said on Friday that an unknown object had entered the country’s airspace before vanishing off radars, and that all indications pointed to it being a Russian missile.
Speaking to Russian state media outlet RIA Novosti on Saturday, Russia’s charge d’affaires in Poland, Andrei Ordash, said that Moscow would not comment on the event until Warsaw had given the Kremlin evidence of an airspace violation.
“Until concrete evidence is presented, we will not give any explanations, because these accusations are unsubstantiated,” he said.