Ukraine shelling continues in Russia's Belgorod as thousands relocated — governor

Shelling by Ukrainian forces on Russia's Belgorod region continued overnight on Sunday after two people were killed the previous night and hundreds of children were evacuated away from the border, governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said on Sunday.

“Overnight, it was quite restless,” Gladkov said on the Telegram channel, adding the Shebekino and Volokonovsky districts suffered “lots” of damage from shelling during the night.

More than 4,000 people were relocated to temporary accommodation in the region, which borders Ukraine to its south and west, Gladkov said.

The reality of the war, which Moscow launched in Ukraine in February 2022, has been increasingly brought to Russia, with intensified shelling on border regions but also air strikes deep inside the country, including earlier this week on Moscow.

In late May, Russia's military said it had repelled one of the most serious cross-border attacks by a Ukrainian “sabotage group” that it said had entered Russian territory in Belgorod.

Ukraine denied attacking Moscow last week and has also denied its military is involved in the incursions into Belgorod. It says they are conducted by Russian volunteer fighters.

On Saturday, Gladkov escorted about 600 children from the region's Shebekino and Graivoron districts to Yaroslavl and Kaluga.

“The children of Shebekino are very worried about their hometown,” he said. “I started leaving, they stopped me and with anxiety started asking questions.”

Shebekino, a town of about 40,000 on the border, and other Belgorod places have been attacked repeatedly recently, with Gladkov telling the Russian media the region now lives in “conditions of actual war”.

Moscow calls its actions in Ukraine a “special military operation”, not a war and says it was launched to protect Russia from the threat of Ukraine's moves towards the West. Kyiv and its allies say it is an unprovoked aggression to grab land.

Russian air strikes repelled over Kyiv, but hit regional airfield

Meanwhile, Russia launched a fresh wave of air strikes against Ukraine early on Sunday, striking an airfield in a central region but failing to hit the capital Kyiv, Ukrainian authorities said.

Air force spokesperson Yuriy Ihnat told local television four of six cruise missiles had been shot down by air defences but two had struck an “operational airfield” near the central city of Kropyvnytskyi.

He added two of the five Iranian-made drones launched by Russia had struck infrastructure in the northern Sumy region.

Kyiv officials said air defences had downed all projectiles aimed at the capital before they reached the city.

Separately, a two-year-old girl was killed and 22 people were wounded in an earlier Russian missile strike on Sunday near the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro, the regional governor said.

Russia has stepped up regular attacks on Kyiv since May, especially at night, in what officials say is an attempt to damage morale ahead of a long-expected Ukrainian counteroffensive to reclaim Russian-occupied territory.

“For the second night in a row, Kyivans are not hearing the sounds of explosions overhead,” Serhiy Popko, head of the local military administration, said on Telegram.

Reuters could not independently verify the claim, but witnesses reported hearing several blasts in the Kyiv region.

All of Ukraine was under air-raid alerts for nearly three hours.