The Russian authorities said on Saturday that a Ukrainian attack on the city of Belgorod had killed at least 18 people and injured more than 110 others, in the deadliest strike against a Russian city since the beginning of the war nearly two years ago.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a statement that Ukraine had hit Belgorod — a regional center of around 330,000 residents about 25 miles north of the Ukrainian border — with two missiles and several rockets, adding that the strike was “indiscriminate” and would “not go unpunished.”
The ministry said that most of the rockets had been shot down, but that some debris had fallen on the city. The Ukrainian government has not officially commented on the Belgorod attack, and Russian claims could not be immediately verified.
Vyacheslav Gladkov, the governor of the Belgorod region, said that three children were among those killed on Saturday and that a residential area in the city center had been hit.
The Russian Emergency Situations Ministry posted a video of the aftermath of the bombardment that showed cars on fire, injured people being carried to shelter and broken glass on the city’s buildings. And Russian state television broadcast videos posted by residents of Belgorod that showed plumes of smoke over the city, shattered glass near residential buildings and people lying on pavements.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry said that an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting would be convened on Saturday to discuss the attack.
The strike on Belgorod was in response to Russia’s air assault on Friday against Ukraine, said an official from Ukraine’s intelligence services, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter, adding that only military facilities had been targeted. The assault on Ukraine — one of the largest of the war — killed at least 39 people, wounded about 160 others and hit civilian and military infrastructure.
Ukrainian rescuers on Saturday were still pulling bodies from the rubble of a factory that was struck in central Kyiv, the capital, according to local authorities.
On Saturday evening, the Ukrainian authorities said, Russia launched an assault on Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, which is about 40 miles from Belgorod, in what may have been retaliation for the Ukrainian attack.
Ihor Terekhov, the mayor of Kharkiv, said that at least 16 people had been injured in the attack. The local authorities said the Russian military struck the city center six times and reported damage to residential buildings, shops and a medical facility.
Unverified videos and images shared on social media showed that the Kharkiv Palace Hotel, one of the city’s most popular hotels and a frequent venue for foreign journalists, was hit. Photos of the aftermath of the attack showed the facade of the building pierced by a huge hole the size of several stories.
The attacks over the past two days underscore how both Moscow and Kyiv remain willing to escalate a war that will most likely mark its two-year anniversary in February, despite Ukraine’s problems with securing Western funding and an increased sense of war fatigue in Russia.
Ukraine has said several times that it does not fear taking the war to Russian territory, and it has previously targeted the Belgorod region with cross-border strikes and even brief ground assaults by Kyiv-backed, anti-Kremlin Russian fighters.
So far, such attacks have resulted in at least 50 deaths inside Russia, according to the United Nations, as well as the evacuation of a few thousand civilians and minor clashes with the Russian military.
While the details of Saturday’s attack by Ukraine were not immediately clear, the death toll alone made it noteworthy, shattering the sense of relative normalcy that has prevailed in Russia despite the war, and bringing to Russia the kind of suffering that Ukrainians have endured on an almost daily basis for nearly two years. The attack will also likely embolden Russian pro-invasion hawks who have been arguing that Moscow must use a much heavier tactic in Ukraine.
The back-to-back air assaults on Friday and Saturday come as Ukrainian and Russian troops are bogged down on land in bloody and mostly inconclusive fighting. Moscow has made several advances all along the front in recent weeks, but military experts say its gains are incremental and unlikely to lead to a major breakthrough in the near future.
