Russia blames US for deadly Ukrainian attack on Crimea

By Guy Faulconbridge and Filipp Lebedev

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia said on Sunday the United States was responsible for a Ukrainian attack on the Russian-annexed Crimean peninsula with five US missiles, killing four people, including two children, and wounding 151 others.

The Russian Defense Ministry said four of the US-supplied Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) missiles equipped with cluster warheads had been shot down by air defense systems and the ammunition of a fifth had detonated in the air.

Footage from Russian state television showed people running from a beach and some being carried away on sun loungers.

Russian authorities in Crimea said rocket fragments hit shortly after midday near a beach in the north of the city of Sevastopol, where locals were vacationing.

The incident sparked angry reactions among Russian public figures.

The Defense Department said US specialists had determined the missiles’ flight coordinates using information from American spy satellites, meaning Washington was directly responsible.

“The responsibility for the targeted missile attack on the civilian population of Sevastopol lies primarily with Washington, which supplied Ukraine with these weapons, and with the Kyiv regime, from whose territory this attack was carried out,” the ministry said in a statement.

Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and now considers the Black Sea peninsula an integral part of its territory, even though most of the world still considers it part of Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin sent tens of thousands of troops to Ukraine on February 24, 2022, in what he called a defensive move against a hostile and aggressive West. Ukraine and the West say Russia is waging an imperialist war.

Earlier this year, the United States began supplying Ukraine with longer-range ATACMS missiles, which have a range of 300 kilometers.

Reuters was unable to immediately confirm battlefield reports from either side.

TREATMENT OF THE INJURED

The Russian-appointed governor of Sevastopol, Mihail Razvozhaev, put the death toll at four, 144 were injured, 82 of whom had to be hospitalized. Among the injured were 27 children.

Specialists were flown in from other parts of Russia.

Russia will respond to Sunday’s attack, the Defense Ministry said, without giving further details. The Kremlin said Putin had been “in constant contact with the military” since the attack.

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Security Council and a leading voice of the Russian hawks, called the incident “a heinous, despicable act against our people.”

He compared the situation to Sunday’s attacks by armed men on a synagogue, a church and a police station in Dagestan and said there was “no difference for us” between the US government, Ukrainian politicians and “crazy fanatics”.

Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, a prominent supporter of the invasion, said there was “no justification whatsoever for a missile attack on civilians” and expressed outrage that the incident occurred on the Orthodox holiday of Trinity.

Neither Ukraine nor the United States has commented on the attack, which came on a day when Ukraine said Russian strikes on the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv had killed one person and wounded 10 others.

Putin has repeatedly accused the United States of using Ukraine to undermine Russia’s own security, a charge Kyiv and its Western allies deny, and warned of the growing risk of a direct confrontation between Moscow and the US-led NATO alliance.

(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge in Moscow and Filipp Lebedev in London; Editing by Gareth Jones, Ron Popeski and Bill Berkrot)