Russia-Ukraine war: A day after Russian forces killed at least 41 civilians in Ukraine, 21 people were killed reportedly in a retaliatory step by Kyiv on Saturday. According to reports, the shelling came in the centre of the Russian border city of Belgorod on Saturday. Local officials claimed 21 including three children were killed in the incident.
A further 110 people were wounded in the strike, said regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov, making it one of the deadliest attacks on Russian soil since the start of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine 22 months ago.
Russian authorities accused Kyiv of carrying out the attack, which took place the day after an 18-hour aerial bombardment across Ukraine killed at least 41 civilians.
Scary images, and videos surface on social media platforms
Images of Belgorod on social media showed burning cars 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 very heart of the city, which lies 40 kilometres north of the Ukrainian border and 670 kilometres south of Moscow.
While previous attacks have hit the city, they have rarely taken place in daylight and have claimed fewer lives.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said it identified the ammunition used in the strike as Czech-made Vampire rockets and Olkha missiles fitted with cluster-munition warheads. It provided no additional information.
“This crime will not go unpunished": Russia
“This crime will not go unpunished,” the ministry said in a statement on social media. The Kremlin said 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 travelling to Belgorod from Moscow.
Russian diplomats also called for a meeting of the UN Security Council in connection with the strike. Speaking to Russia’s state news agency, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Britain and the United States were guilty of encouraging Kyiv to carry out what she described as a “terrorist attack.”
She also placed the blame on EU countries who had supplied Ukraine with weapons. “Silence in response to the unbridled barbarity of Ukraine’s Nazis and their puppeteers and accomplices from ‘civilized democracies’ will be akin to complicity in their bloody deeds,” the ministry said in a statement.
Earlier Saturday, Moscow officials 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 wounded 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.
(With inputs from agency)
