Ukrainian drone attacks kill four in Crimea – governor
At least four people have been killed and ten others wounded in Ukrainian drone attacks on Crimea, local governor Sergey Aksyonov has said.
One person was killed and three others were wounded during a drone attack on a suburban train traveling from Azovskoye to Kerch, Aksyonov wrote in a post on Telegram on Thursday morning.
The strikes damaged several “nonresidential facilities” in the city of Simferopol, killing at least three people and injuring seven others, the governor added.
The Crimean port city of Sevastopol, home to the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, was also attacked overnight, according to its governor, Mikhail Razvozhayev.
At least 20 incoming Ukrainian drones were shot down by air defenses, and there were two incidents of drone debris falling in residential areas. No injuries were reported.
The Russian Defense Ministry has reported that 272 drones were intercepted and destroyed over several regions of the country on Thursday morning. Apart from Crimea and the waters of the Azov and Black seas, the UAVs were downed over Belgorod, Bryansk, Volgograd, Voronezh, Kursk, Nizhny Novgorod, Orel, Rostov, Ryazan, and Tambov regions.
The attack on Crimea came less than a day after a Ukrainian strike on a passenger bus en route from Moscow to Simferopol while it was traveling through the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). Eight civilians were killed and 11 others injured in what the Russian authorities are investigating as an act of “terrorism.”
Russia was hit by another major Ukrainian drone attack overnight, with 272 UAVs shot down across the country, according to the Defense Ministry. The interceptions took place over Belgorod, Bryansk, Volgograd, Voronezh, Kursk, Novgorod, Orel, Rostov, Ryazan and Tambov Regions as well as over Crimea and the Sea of Azov, the ministry said.
Moscow previously warned that it would carry out “systematic and consistent strikes” on Ukraine’s military infrastructure, such as drone production facilities, command posts, and “decision-making centers,” in response to Kiev’s terrorist attacks, including one in the Lugansk People’s Republic on May 22.
On that occasion, Ukrainian forces struck a college dormitory in the town of Starobelsk in several waves of drone attacks late at night while students were asleep, killing 21 people, mostly teenage girls, and injuring dozens of others.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that the Ukrainian leadership had opened “a new chapter in its crime spree” with the attack on Starobelsk, adding that those responsible would face “well-deserved and inevitable punishment.”
On May 24, Moscow launched a large-scale missile and drone attack against military-related targets in Ukraine, among other things deploying intermediate-range hypersonic Oreshnik systems. Another major Russian raid took place on Tuesday, targeting defense industry facilities in Kiev, parts of Zaporozhye and Kherson regions still under Kiev’s control, as well as Dnepropetrovsk, Poltava, Khmelnitsky, and Sumy regions.
