Attack on Crimea after Ukraine fired missiles near Kyiv

The Russian Defense Ministry reported several deaths and injuries as a result of an alleged Ukrainian ATACMS missile attack with cluster munitions on the occupied Crimean peninsula.

Four missiles were shot down by Russian air defenses, a fifth was hit and diverted from its trajectory before exploding over Sevastopol, Crimea’s largest city, the ministry said.

Four people were killed, including two children, and more than 150 people were injured, according to Mikhail Razvozhayev, the Kremlin-appointed governor of Sevastopol. Images on social media showed beachgoers running for cover.

Russia has occupied the Crimean peninsula since 2014.

The incident occurred just hours after Ukraine said it had shot down two of three Russian Kalibr cruise missiles fired from the Sea of ​​Azov toward the capital region on Sunday.

Explosions were heard in Kyiv and its southern suburbs early Sunday morning. Two people suffered minor injuries and at least 20 residential buildings and several small businesses were damaged by rocket debris, the region’s governor Ruslan Kravchenko said on Telegram.

One person was killed and at least nine injured in a strike in Kharkiv on Sunday afternoon. Half of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, is without electricity and the city’s subway is out of service.

Sunday’s attacks followed a glide bomb attack on Kharkiv on Saturday that killed three people and wounded 56, many of whom are still in hospital.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Kremlin forces used more than 2,400 guided aerial bombs against Ukraine in June alone, most of them on the Kharkiv and Donetsk regions.

“Ukraine needs the necessary resources and means to destroy the carriers of these bombs, especially Russian fighter jets, wherever they operate,” Zelensky said in a post on X.

In addition, the Ukrainian Navy claimed to have destroyed a Geran-2 drone training facility in the Krasnodar region of southern Russia, east of the annexed Crimean peninsula.

“New satellite images confirm the destruction of the storage and preparation facilities, training buildings, and control and communication points of Shahed-136/Geran-2,” the Navy said on X. It said the operation was carried out jointly with the Ukrainian State Security Service, also known as the SBU. Russia has not commented.

Also on Sunday, the Russian Defense Ministry said it had destroyed 33 Ukrainian drones overnight. Most of them were in the Bryansk region on the border with Ukraine and Belarus, others in the Smolensk, Lipetsk and Tula regions.

As the Institute for War Studies reported in a daily update, Russian troops appear to be increasing the pace of their attacks in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine while simultaneously reducing the frequency of attacks in the Kharkiv region.

This is “consistent with the ISW assessment that Russian offensive operations in Kharkiv Oblast are primarily aimed at pinning down and diverting Ukrainian forces to enable an intensification of Russian forces elsewhere,” the US military analysts said.

The Ukrainian General Staff said the number of Russian combat attacks in the direction of Pokrovsk in Donetsk reached 44 on Saturday.

This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without any modifications.