(Kyiv) Russian officials in Ukraine’s partially occupied Kherson and Luhansk regions said Ukrainian attacks left at least 28 dead, as drone offensives continued between Russia and Ukraine in the night from Friday to Saturday.
A Ukrainian attack Friday on the small town of Sadove in Ukraine’s partially occupied Kherson region killed 22 people and wounded 15, Moscow-backed Governor Vladimir Saldo said.
Russia’s Tass news agency quoted Saldo as saying that Ukrainian forces first hit the city with a French-made guided bomb, then attacked again with a U.S.-supplied HIMARS missile. He added that Ukrainian forces “deliberately launched a repeated strike to inflict more casualties” when “residents of nearby houses came out to help the injured.”
Further east, Leonid Pasechnik, the Russian governor of the partially occupied Luhansk region, said Saturday that two more bodies had been pulled from the rubble after Friday’s Ukrainian missile attack on the regional capital, also called Luhansk. . Russian state news agency Interfax cited regional authorities as saying that raised the death toll to six. Pasechnik also said 60 people were injured in the attack.
He announced that Saturday is a day of mourning in the region, with public events canceled.
Ukraine has made no comment on these two attacks.
Meanwhile, drone attacks between Russia and Ukraine have persisted.
Ukraine launched a barrage of drones on Russian territory overnight from Friday to Friday, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Saturday. Twenty-five drones were reportedly destroyed over the southern Kuban and Astrakhan regions, the western Tula region and the Crimean peninsula annexed by Moscow.
On Saturday morning, officials said air defenses had for the first time shot down Ukrainian drones over the North Ossetia region of the North Caucasus, about 550 miles (900 km) east of the border line. front in the partially occupied Zaporizhia region.
The Russian Defense Ministry said one drone was destroyed, while regional governor Sergei Menyailo reported that three drones were shot down over the region. Menyailo said the target was a military airfield.
Ukrainian air defenses overnight shot down nine out of 13 Russian drones in the central Poltava region, southeastern Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions, and the Kharkiv region in the northeast, the military said on Saturday Ukrainian air force.
The regional governor of Dnipropetrovsk. Serhiy Lysak said the night drone attack damaged commercial and residential buildings.