At least four people were killed and over a dozen injured in a series of attacks on Belgorod Region, the local governor has reported
The Ukrainian forces launched multiple drone raids and artillery strikes on the city of Belgorod and several villages near the Russia-Ukraine border, which claimed the lives of four civilians while many others, including children, suffered shrapnel injuries, Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov has said.
The Russian border region suffered a spate of strikes, with almost 30 incoming projectiles shot down from the skies over the course of Saturday evening and early Sunday morning, according to Gladkov. However, despite the interceptions, the attack resulted in multiple casualties.
“To much grief, the number of civilian deaths increased to 4 people,” the official wrote on Telegram.
Three of the victims were killed as a result of rocket artillery strikes on the Oktyabrsky settlement shortly before 7pm. Two of them died on the spot, while another man succumbed to “shrapnel wounds to his lower extremities” in a hospital a few hours later.
Another woman “was killed as a result of a direct hit in the yard of a private residential house in the village of Dubovoye,” Gladkov wrote around 9pm, adding that she “was in a greenhouse at the time of the attack and died of her injuries before the ambulance arrived.”
While there were no casualties in the city of Belgorod itself, at least two apartment buildings suffered heavy damage as a result of direct artillery hits. Two schools were damaged by blasts and shrapnel, while several commercial buildings also had their facades, windows and roofs partially destroyed. Several vehicles were damaged and were burned entirely, according to videos from the scene.
By midnight, the number of those injured across the region reached at least 16 people, including at least two children.
A 8-year-old boy who was wounded in the shelling of the Oktyabrsky settlement suffered a “blast injury and external trauma to the lumbar back region,” Gladkov wrote, adding that the child’s “condition has been characterized as of medium severity.”
In another incident, a 9-year-old girl was injured when a “moving car was attacked by a drone on the highway between the village of Borisovka and the hamlet of Plotvyanka in the Volokonovsky district,” Gladkov added.
Belgorod has become the one of the main targets of Kiev’s attacks, following a bombardment on New Year’s Eve that killed 25 civilians at a festive fair, with continued shelling and even attempts to break through to Russian territory in recent months.
In early May, Moscow’s armed forces began a push into the Belgorod-adjacent Kharkov Region, seizing numerous villages in an effort to create a buffer zone to curb cross-border attacks. President Vladimir Putin repeatedly said that should Kiev continue to “shell residential areas in border territories,” Russia “will be forced to create a security zone” to deprive Kiev of the capability to make such strikes.