Russia, Ukraine trade accusations as drone and missile strikes kill five civilians in each country

New Delhi: Russia and Ukraine accused each other of causing fresh civilian deaths, with officials on Tuesday in the Moscow region reporting five people killed in a Ukrainian drone strike, while Ukrainian authorities said Russian strikes had killed a similar number, including two children, at sites scattered across the country. The exchange came a day after a Ukrainian drone crashed onto a crowded beach near Gelendzhik on Russia’s Black Sea coast, killing at least seven people.

Russia has continued to pound civilian areas of Ukraine through more than four years of war, even as Moscow insists its forces strike only military facilities. Kyiv, in turn, has spent the war years developing long-range drones capable of reaching deep into Russian territory, and over the past year it has repeatedly targeted oil facilities, storage depots and other infrastructure central to Moscow’s war effort.

Industrial zone near Moscow hit

The deadliest single incident on Russian soil on Tuesday occurred at the Novoselki industrial zone in the Chekhov district, south of Moscow. The regional governor, Andrey Vorobyov, said on Telegram that the Ukrainian drone strike had killed five people and wounded 10 others, sparking several fires, including one at a warehouse.

Russia’s defence ministry said its forces had destroyed 320 Ukrainian fixed-wing drones across the country in the preceding 12 hours, with interceptions reported in more than a dozen regions as well as in Crimea. Vorobyov said air defences in his region had repelled a further drone raid overnight, and separate interceptions were reported over other parts of the Moscow region.

Andriy Kovalenko, who heads the counter-disinformation centre within Ukraine’s national security and defence council, placed the blame on Russia’s own air defences, arguing on Telegram that they had shot down the drone and that authorities had failed to warn residents in time. It is a line of argument Kovalenko has used before, including after Monday’s beach strike near Gelendzhik.

Wildberries warehouses hit again

Russia’s largest online retailer, Wildberries, has emerged as a recurring target of the campaign. The company confirmed on Tuesday that its warehouse in the Leningrad region, near St Petersburg, was on fire, while the Leningrad governor, Aleksandr Drozdenko, said at least 17 drones had been shot down over his region, with damage recorded in the Krasny Bor warehouse district.

A second Wildberries facility, in the village of Emmaus in the Tver region between Moscow and St Petersburg, sustained partial damage to a wall from drone debris, according to the regional governor, Vitaly Korolyov. Ukrainian officials have previously said the retailer’s nationwide storage and transport network is being targeted because it allegedly helps supply Russian soldiers with military equipment, including drones – a claim Wildberries has not publicly addressed.

Ukraine’s air force said separately that Russia had launched 136 drones and one ballistic missile into the country overnight, of which 117 drones were intercepted or otherwise neutralized. The ballistic missile and 14 drones reached their targets.

Ukraine reports civilian toll

In Ukraine’s northern Sumy region, six Russian glide bombs killed two girls, aged five and 10, along with an elderly woman, according to the head of the regional military administration, Oleh Hryhorov. Further Russian strikes hit Kharkiv and 18 towns and villages across the northern region over the previous day, killing one person and injuring seven others, including an eight-year-old child, the Kharkiv regional administration head, Oleh Syniehubov, said.

In Balakliia, also in the Kharkiv region, strikes damaged an apartment building, a library, three shops and more than 10 houses, wounding two women, local authorities said. Further south, two 250-kilogramme, or 550-pound, glide bombs struck the eastern city of Kramatorsk, injuring 22 people, according to local officials; Kramatorsk sits at the northern edge of Ukraine’s defensive belt in Donetsk region.

Russian missile strikes were also reported overnight in the Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa regions, with houses destroyed in Odesa, according to images released by Ukraine’s emergency service. In Kherson, a video verified by regional authorities showed a Russian drone chasing down and striking a car in which a man had taken shelter; he suffered wounds to his back, legs and arms.

Toll keeps climbing

More than 16,000 civilians have been killed in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022, according to the United Nations’ most recent casualty report issued last month. The vast majority of those deaths have occurred in areas under Ukrainian government control, and the world body has noted that casualties have risen steadily with each year of the war.

Tuesday’s exchange of strikes is unlikely to be the last. Both militaries have leaned increasingly on cheaply produced drones and precision-guided munitions to sustain pressure on the other’s rear areas, a pattern that shows no sign of easing more than four years into a war that continues to draw civilians, on both sides of the border, into its line of fire.