Shelling in the centre of the Russian border city of Belgorod killed 14 people and injured 45 more on Saturday, emergency services said.
Russian officials accused Kyiv of carrying out the attack, which took place the day after an 18-hour aerial Russian barrage across Ukraine killed at least 39 civilians.
Images of Belgorod on social media showed cars set alight and plumes of black smoke rising among damaged buildings as air raid sirens sounded. One strike hit close to a public ice rink in the very heart of the city.
Earlier on Saturday, Moscow officials had reported shooting down 32 Ukrainian drones over the country’s Moscow, Bryansk, Oryol, and Kursk regions.
They also reported that cross-border shelling had killed two other people in Russia. A man died and four other people were injured when a missile struck a private home in the Belgorod region late Friday evening and a 9-year-old was killed in a separate incident in the Bryansk region.
Cities across western Russia have come under regular attack from drones since May.
Ukrainian officials never acknowledge responsibility for attacks on Russian territory or the Crimean peninsula. However, larger aerial strikes against Russia have previously followed heavy assaults on Ukrainian cities.
Russian drone strikes against Ukraine continued on Saturday, with the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces reporting that 10 drones had been shot down across the Kherson, Khmelnytskyi, and Mykolaiv regions. Moscow’s forces launched 122 missiles and dozens of drones across Ukraine, an onslaught described by one air force official as the biggest aerial barrage of the war.
