Russian officials announced today that a drone attack by Ukraine on a busy beach has resulted in six fatalities and injured 40 individuals.
Video evidence from the scene at Arkhipo-Osipovka, close to the popular Black Sea tourist destination of Gelendzhik, depicts a missile smashing onto a beach full of sun-seekers before detonating.
In response to the explosion, a team of medical disaster experts was mobilized to provide emergency care.
This incident follows just hours after Ukraine executed one of its most extensive drone offensives against Russia since the conflict erupted in 2022.
The attack affected numerous sites, including oil processing facilities, storage warehouses, and a plant manufacturing drones.
The resort is situated just a few miles from president Vladimir Putin’s ‘billion dollar’ holiday palace.
Veniamin Kondratyev, the governor of Russia’s southern Krasnodar region where Gelendzhik is located, said: ‘What happened today was a deliberate attack by the Kyiv regime on the civilian population, which has no connection whatsoever to military infrastructure.’
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova accused Ukraine of resorting to terrorism. Kyiv has not commented on the strike and it is not yet clear what the drone’s intended target was.
Footage from the beach showed the drone hurtling towards the ground, before detonating in what appeared to be a dense crowd of people. It was unclear whether the device had been shot down by Russian air defences.
Beachgoers were heard screaming just before impact and those in the water quickly returned to shore.
Footage of an alleged attack on the Black Sea resort Arkhipo-Osipovka shows a drone crashing into a beach packed with sunbathers and exploding
Russian authorities have claimed that the attack killed six people and injured a further 40
One witness told local media: ‘We were on the beach at the time. I’m in complete shock.
‘We were on the beach, didn’t have time to leave, hid behind a ledge, covered ourselves with sun loungers, and didn’t see where it exploded.’
Another said: ‘While we were parking, we saw crowds of people leaving the beach, cars driving away.
‘A friend called me and said we had to turn around and leave because a drone had crashed. We saw a man with a bloody shoulder.’
A local resident, meanwhile, said: ‘We were already home when we heard a barrage of gunfire, like a machine gun, and an explosion. Everything shook.’
The Kremlin last month accused Kyiv of killing 11 people, including four children, in an attack on a holiday camp in a Russian-held part of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region.
Russia itself has repeatedly struck targets in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, displacing millions and laying waste to swathes of the country. Thousands of civilians have so far died in the war, most of them Ukrainians killed in Russian attacks.
Ukraine has stepped up long-range attacks across the border in recent months, mainly targeting oil refineries and e-commerce warehouses, in what it says is a campaign to make Russians feel the cost of the war.
In Belgorod, just 20 miles from Russia’s border with Ukraine, a drone factory was targeted by drones.
Footage shared online showed the factory being blown up and a woman was heard saying: ‘Everything’s on fire there, everything. It’s a disaster, that’s where they make drones and teach you how to fly them. It’s ****ed, it’s all blown up.’
The beach attack came as Ukraine launched possibly its most intense bombardment of the war.
Two major oil refineries were blown up, as well as a warehouse owned by Wildberries – Russia’s equivalent of Amazon – while the Engels-2 military airbase that houses strategic bombers was also hit.
Ukrainian forces also targeted fuel trucks heading to Russian-controlled Crimea.
‘A fire broke out at one of the company’s logistics sites in the Vladimir region following an attack,’ Wildberries said in a statement, adding that warehouse staff had been evacuated.
The Black Sea resort is situated just a few miles from president Vladimir Putin’s ‘billion dollar’ holiday palace
Ukrainian drones also hit fuel trucks bound for Crimea in one of Kyiv’s biggest bombardments since the war began
Among the targets of the strikes was a warehouse belonging to the Russian e-commerce giant Wildberries in the Vladimir region
Regional governor Alexander Avdeyev said the attack on the warehouse was carried out by drones.
‘There is damage and a fire,’ he posted on the Russian messaging app Max, adding that ‘a young man was injured’.
Since mid-July, Ukraine has struck around 20 sites belonging to Wildberries across various parts of Russia and Crimea.
The initial attacks overnight on July 18 left eight people dead and nearly 90 wounded at sites in the Moscow and Tambov regions.
Since then, Ukrainian drone strikes have targeted sites near St Petersburg, Simferopol in Crimea, Krasnodar, Volgograd and Samara.
Wildberries is a highly popular online retail platform in Russia. The attacks on its warehouses are part of a campaign of long-range Ukrainian strikes targeting civilian infrastructure in Russia, which has been waging a large-scale offensive in Ukraine since February 2022.
Kyiv says its aim is to force the Kremlin to negotiate an end to the war.
Russia said this morning that it was stepping up protection of ships in the Azov-Black Sea basin while also developing alternative cargo routes, in a move that follows a sharp escalation of attacks at sea by both sides in the war.
The Kremlin’s transport ministry said that in response to ‘the tense situation in the Sea of Azov stemming from hostile drone attacks on maritime vessels’, it had set up a task force to find new routes and switch cargo flows to other modes of transport.
‘A number of stevedoring companies have already expressed their readiness to handle additional cargo volumes and accelerate shipment rates at their terminals, within the limits of their operational capabilities,’ a statement read.
Together with the defence ministry, ‘additional measures are being implemented to ensure navigational safety and to protect maritime vessels in the Azov-Black Sea basin’.
A car lies destroyed following a Russian missile attack on Kyiv over the weekend
A woman cries as she picks up debris near the site of a Russian attack on the Ukrainian region of Zaporizhzhia yesterday
Russia, the world’s largest wheat exporter, and Ukraine, also a major agricultural exporter, have been attacking each other’s agricultural export facilities and commercial vessels in the Black Sea area in recent weeks, driving wheat prices higher on global markets.
Moscow’s main grain lobby group warned on Friday that Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian ships and ports could shut down grain exports through the Black Sea in the near future, pushing up prices and causing hunger in Africa and the Middle East.
Kyiv’s largest farming union, the Ukrainian Agrarian Council, has also warned in recent weeks that Russian strikes on shipping near the southern port of Odesa were restricting exports in the key harvest period and could affect global food supplies.