Ukrainian drone bomb hits Russian regional government building – official

A Ukrainian kamikaze drone injured two women when it hit the offices of the Belgorod Region administration on Tuesday, Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov has reported.

One of the victims was injured by shrapnel, while the other suffered a concussion, the senior official said. The explosion of the aircraft’s payload shattered windows of the building and caused other damage to its exterior, he added.

The building’s entrance sustained much of the damage, with glass doors shattered and the letters identifying its purpose to visitors knocked off by the blast wave, according to images circulated by the media. Debris was scattered in front of it.

Belgorod Region borders Ukraine and its capital is located some 30km from Kiev-controlled territories. The region is regularly subjected to Ukrainian drone and artillery attacks. Earlier in the day, two villagers were injured during a shelling, including one woman, who was taken to the hospital with a serious head injury, Gladkov previously reported.

Meanwhile, in Belgorod, a Ukrainian drone crashed into the wall of a shop on Tuesday morning, causing no casualties, but damaging four parked cars, according to the governor.

That incident was caught on film. Gunshots can be heard in the video as the small aircraft plunged into the wall and blew up.

In yet another incident later in the day, a Ukrainian drone crashed into the roof of a shopping mall located near the city’s railway terminal. Gladkov said that nobody was hurt in the incident but that a car parked nearby was damaged.

Kiev has on numerous occasions launched drones against Russian civilian government buildings. In one of the higher-profile incidents, two drones reached the Kremlin in May 2023, causing minor damage to the domed roof of the Senate Palace, the building housing the residency of the Russian president. Moscow said it considered the incident an attempted assassination of President Vladimir Putin.

According to Western media reports, the Ukrainian drone program involves multiple competing developers who vie for government sponsorship and are not above launching attacks for the sake of publicity rather than any military value.