Officials installed by Russia in the partially occupied Ukrainian regions of Kherson and Luhansk said Ukrainian attacks left at least 28 people dead as Russia and Ukraine continued to exchange drone strikes overnight Saturday.
A Ukrainian attack on Friday in the small town of Sadove in Ukraine's partially occupied Sadove region killed 22 and wounded 15, the Moscow-backed governor, Vladimir Saldo, said.
Russian state news agency Tass quoted Saldo as saying that Ukrainian forces first hit the city with a French-made guided bomb and then struck again with a US-supplied HIMARS missile. He said Ukrainian forces had “deliberately carried out a repeated strike to create a greater number of casualties” when “residents of nearby houses ran out to help the wounded”.
Further east, Leonid Pasechnik, the Russian-installed governor of Ukraine's partially occupied Luhansk region, said on Saturday that two more bodies had been pulled from the rubble after Friday's Ukrainian missile attack in the regional capital, also called Luhansk. Russian state news agency Interfax quoted regional authorities as saying this brought the death toll to six. Pasechnik also said 60 people were injured in the attack.
Pasechnik declared Saturday a day of mourning in the region, with public events cancelled.
Ukraine did not comment on either attack.
Meanwhile, drone attacks between Russia and Ukraine persisted.
Ukraine launched a drone strike across Russian territory overnight Friday, the Russian Defense Ministry said Saturday. Twenty-five drones were reportedly destroyed in Russia's southern Kuban and Astrakhan regions, the western Tula region and the Moscow-annexed Crimean peninsula.
On Saturday morning, officials said air defenses for the first time shot down Ukrainian drones over the region of North Ossetia in the North Caucasus, about 900 km (560 miles) east of the front line in the partially occupied Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine.
Russia's Defense Ministry said one drone had been destroyed, while regional governor Sergei Menyailo reported three downed drones in the region. Menyailo said the target was a military airfield.
Ukraine's air defense shot down nine of 13 Russian drones overnight over the central Poltava region, southeastern Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions and the northeastern Kharkiv region, the air force said on Saturday of Ukraine
Dnipropetrovsk regional governor Serhiy Lysak said the overnight drone strike damaged commercial and residential buildings.
