A Ukrainian drone strike Saturday caused a massive explosion at an ammunition depot in Russia-annexed Crimea, forcing the evacuation of nearby homes in the latest attack since Moscow canceled a landmark grain deal.
Sergey Aksyonov, the Kremlin-appointed head of Crimea, said in a Telegram post that there were no immediate reports of casualties from the strike, but that authorities were evacuating civilians within a 5-kilometer radius of the blast site.Sign up for NBC LA newsletters.
The strike came during a week in which Ukraine attacked the Kerch Bridge and Russia, in what it described as “retribution” for the bridge attack, bombarded southern Ukrainian port cities, damaging critical infrastructure including grain and oil terminals. Speaking at the Aspen security forum via video link, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the bridge a legitimate target for Ukraine, noting that Russia has used it to ferry military supplies and it must be “neutralized.”
As fierce fighting continues in Ukraine's bid to retake territory from Russia, Russian shelling killed at least two civilians and wounded four others on Saturday, Ukrainian officials reported. A 52-year-old woman died in Kupiansk, a town in the northeastern Kharkiv region, while another person was killed in a cross-border Russian attack on a village in the neighboring Sumy province.
“We were filming the Ukrainian army during target practice when suddenly we heard several explosions," DW correspondent Mathias Bölinger said."We lay down, more explosions followed, we saw people were wounded. Later, the Ukrainian army confirmed that we had been fired at with cluster munitions.” The Russian Defense Ministry announced that a group of Russian journalists came under artillery fire in the southern Zaporizhzhia region. In an online statement, it said four correspondents for pro-Kremlin media had been struck by cluster munitions and that one of them, Rostislav Zhuravlev of the state RIA Novosti news agency, later died from his injuries.
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