Blackouts hit Russia's Belgorod as Ukrainian drone attacks surge Residents of Russia's Belgorod region say blackouts, air-raid sirens and the sound of gunfire aimed at incoming Ukrainian drones are becoming increasingly common, as Kyiv retaliates against repeated bombardments of its cities with cross-border strikes of its own. It's so loud and so terrifying, says Nina, a Belgorod resident who asked us to change her name. I was coming back from the clinic when a siren went off. As usual, I received Telegram alerts about a drone attack. Then bursts of automatic gunfire broke out, I ran into a nearby courtyard and tried to hide under an arch, she recalls.

A Russian air attack has bombarded Kyiv in the latest attack on the Ukrainian capital. Ukraine's air defence units destroyed dozens of cruise and ballistic missiles early on Monday morning, the city's military administration said on the Telegram messaging app. Meanwhile, authorities in the Russian region of Belgorod said a Ukrainian attack destroyed a childcare facility, as the warring pair continue to swap air strikes. Ukrainian forces said that they destroyed 22 out of 35 missiles and 20 out of 23 attack drones over the Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Poltava, Mykolaiv and Zaporizhzhia regions. Despite Kyiv's defensive action, the attack on the city produced a series of explosions, forcing residents into bomb shelters.

Seven people, including three children, were killed in a Russian drone attack on a gas station in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv on Saturday. A missile strike on the Russian city of Belgorod near the Ukraine border on Thursday killed six people, including a child, and injured 18 others, a Russian official said. It was the latest in exchanges of long-range missile and rocket fire in Russia's war on Ukraine. Hours earlier, Russia fired two dozen cruise and ballistic missiles at a broad area of Ukraine, hitting multiple regions after a midnight strike in Ukraine's northeast killed five people in an apartment building, authorities said. Five of the 18 people injured in Belgorod, a city of around 340,000 people, were children, regional Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov said on Telegram.

At least 10 people, including a child, have been killed and 45 injured following a Ukrainian attack on the centre of the Russian provincial capital of Belgorod, the Russian Emergencies Ministry has said. Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said on Saturday that the attack on Belgorod, about 30km (19 miles) from the border with Ukraine, had hit a residential area. In a Telegram post, he urged all residents to move to air raid shelters as sirens sounded. Belgorod borders Ukraine's Luhansk, Sumy and Kharkiv regions, some of which were hit by Russian air raids on Ukraine on Friday, in what was one of the deadliest attacks since the war began in February 2022. The death toll has risen to 39 from those attacks.

Kyiv, Ukraine – The enemy "turns border districts into a dead zone", a war correspondent covering the Russia-Ukraine war wrote on his Telegram channel on Saturday. But retired colonel Yuri Kotyonok, who reported from almost every war zone in the former Soviet Union and whose Telegram channel has 420,000 subscribers, was not talking about Ukraine. The districts belong to the western Russian region of Belgorod that borders Ukraine. In recent months, it has been shelled and attacked by drones hundreds of times – 130 in May alone, Russian officials say. As a result, 32 people were killed and 157 wounded, regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said in late April.