Soldier arrested after shooting; Kyiv comes under ballistic missile attack; more Wildberries hit. What we know on day 1,624
A Russian soldier in Crimea opened fire on comrades, killing one and wounding another, before shooting civilians and killing three. Three other people were wounded, said Mikhail Razvozhayev, the Russian-installed governor of the Sevastopol region. He said the attacker had been arrested. “A tragedy in Sevastopol … According to initial information, a soldier opened fire on his fellow servicemen, killing one person, before attacking civilians and killing three of them,” Razvozhayev posted. “All circumstances and causes of the incident are being established.” Crimea, a peninsula illegally annexed by Russia from Ukraine in 2014, has for weeks been the target of Ukrainian attacks aimed at disrupting Russian military logistics and cutting off the occupiers’ gasoline and electricity supplies.
Russian missile and drone strikes killed at least 15 people and wounded dozens more in Kyiv and the surrounding region overnight, authorities said on Wednesday. Kyiv’s military administration said the barrage damaged residential buildings and several warehouses: “The enemy is once again deliberately striking civilians and civilian infrastructure.”
Ukrainian drones struck logistics centres across Russia including several run by online retailer Wildberries, local officials said. Wildberries said its warehouse near St Petersburg caught fire with no casualties. In the Tver region, about 180km north-west of Moscow, a Wildberries facility was damaged by drones in the rural area of Emmaus. In the Moscow region, a drone attack on the city of Chekhov set a warehouse alight and killed five people in the Novoselki industrial zone. Drones damaged a Wildberries warehouse near Krasny Bor in north-western Russia, wounding one person. A fire broke out when a drone fell on a distribution centre in the Leningrad region near St Petersburg operated by Lenta, one of the country’s largest food retailers, the company said, with one person injured.
A North Korean missile unit has begun deploying to western Russia and could be equipped with 120 ballistic missiles and six launchers for strikes against Ukraine, according to Andrii Cherniak, an official at Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said. Russia has fired scores of North Korean ballistic missiles at Ukraine since late 2023. Cherniak told the Reuters news agency that Russia planned to base the missile unit of around 90 North Korean personnel in the western Russian region of Voronezh, within its 112th Missile Brigade. Pyongyang had already sent a new batch of 40 KN-23 and KN-24 missiles and personnel to Russia, but the configuration of the deployment and total number of missiles would be finalised next month, he said.
Ukraine accused Russia of committing a war crime after a video was released showing a drone chasing down a street vendor and exploding in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson. Police said the man in his 50s survived but suffered shock and shrapnel injuries, having dived under the vehicle for shelter. “Today, many were shocked by yet another video of the drone ‘safari’ Russians are carrying out against civilians in Kherson,” said Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president. “We must act and support life in ways that force Russia to think seriously about peace rather than expanding the range of its drones.”
Ukraine’s police and its foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, said the attack happened on Tuesday. Sybiha said the attack formed part of a deliberate Russian campaign to intimidate civilians. “This barbaric Russian war crime in Kherson demands international condemnation and justice, but thousands of similar crimes never come to the public eye.” The minister said the “sadist” pilot of the Russian drone would have known the target was a civilian.
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