MOSCOW, Aug 3 (Reuters) – Russia said on Monday that seven people, including three children, had been killed and 40 injured at its Black Sea holiday resort of Gelendzhik in what it said was a deliberate Ukrainian drone attack on civilians.
There was no immediate comment from Ukraine, which like Russia, says it does not deliberately target civilians in the full-scale war which Moscow launched in 2022.
Social media videos, verified by Reuters, showed what appears to be a drone slamming into a busy beach area near the town of Gelendzhik, accompanied by a loud explosion.
Veniamin Kondratyev, the governor of Russia’s southern Krasnodar region where Gelendzhik is located, called what had happened a tragedy.
“What happened today was a deliberate attack by the Kyiv regime on the civilian population, which has no connection whatsoever to military infrastructure,” Veniamin Kondratyev, the governor of Russia’s southern Krasnodar region which includes the resort, said in a statement on Telegram.
In a separate earlier statement, Kondratyev had spoken of falling drone fragments, a phrase that usually suggests that Russian air defences have brought down a Ukrainian drone. It was not clear in this case if Russia had used electronic jamming or other air defence methods to try to change the course of the drone before it slammed into the beach.
A specialist medical disaster team had been dispatched to the scene of the explosion at the holiday village of Arkhipo-Osipovka, part of the wider Gelendzhik resort area, local authorities said.
The health ministry said that 21 people, including three children, had been rushed to hospital and that nine people were in a serious condition.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova was cited by the TASS state news agency as accusing Ukraine of resorting to terrorism.
Russia last month accused Kyiv’s forces of killing 11 people, including four children, in an attack on a holiday camp in a Russian-held part of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region.
Russia itself has repeatedly struck targets in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, displacing millions and laying waste to swathes of Ukraine. Thousands of civilians have so far died in the war, most of them Ukrainians killed in Russian attacks.
Ukraine has stepped up long-range attacks deep into Russia in recent months, mainly targeting oil refineries and e-commerce warehouses, in what it says is a campaign to make Russians feel the cost of the war.
(Reporting by ReutersWriting by Gleb Stolyarov/Andrew OsbornEditing by Peter Graff)
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