Aug 2 (Reuters) – Ukrainian drone strikes killed at least eight people in Russian regions overnight and on Sunday, hitting targets including a warehouse belonging to Wildberries, Russia’s largest online retailer, regional officials said.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said it downed 635 Ukrainian drones during the night.
The acting governor of Russia’s border region of Belgorod, Alexander Shuvayev, said a Ukrainian drone struck an area next to a playground, killing one child and injuring two.
Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying that the strike was “another inhumane terrorist act” by Ukraine.
The Ukrainian Defence Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ukraine’s drones attacked a Wildberries warehouse in the Samara region, around 800 km (500 miles) from Ukraine’s most advanced military positions, Samara Governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev said. Fedorishchev said there were no casualties and that a fire that broke out as a result of the attack was being put out.
Ukrainian forces have been hitting deeper inside Russia as they expand strikes on economic and energy targets, aiming to undermine Russia’s ability to wage its more than four-year-old war in Ukraine.
They have attacked about a dozen Wildberries sites since July 18 in an attempt to disrupt the operations of the company, a linchpin of the consumer economy often described as Russia’s version of Amazon.
A strike on a residential building in the neighbouring Saratov region killed two people in the city of Engels, Governor Roman Busargin said. Civil infrastructure was damaged both in Engels and in the city of Saratov, Busargin said.
Both Saratov city, home to a major oil refinery, and Engels, home to a military airbase, have come under repeated Ukrainian attack in recent years.
Ukraine’s military said on Sunday that Ukrainian forces attacked the Saratov refinery and the Engels airbase, sparking fires at both facilities. It said its forces also struck an oil depot in the western Kaluga region.
Three people were killed and two injured in a drone attack on the Udmurtia region of Russia, acting governor Olga Abramova said. In the border region of Belgorod, three people were killed and five injured in Ukrainian strikes, the local task force reported.
The governor of Russia’s Bashkortostan region, Radiy Khabirov, said air defence units repelled a massive drone attack on industrial facilities. One of the drones was shot down over the industrial area of the regional capital of Ufa and a fire was being put out, Khabirov said.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said its forces struck infrastructure and two vessels with military cargo in the Ukrainian port of Mykolaiv, as well as a vessel carrying military supplies in the Black Sea.
In the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, regional governor Ivan Fedorov said Russian-launched glide bombs killed one person and injured 21.
(Reporting by Felix Light; Additional reporting by Dan Peleschuk; Editing by Joe Bavier, Kevin Liffey, Alison Williams, Will Dunham and Ron Popeski)
