Death toll in Sevastopol mounts after debris from US-supplied missile falls on beach

Four people are now known to have been killed and 151 injured on Sunday when debris from an intercepted Ukrainian missile landed on a busy beach in Sevastopol, the largest city in Russian-annexed Crimea, according to its Russian-appointed governor, Mikhail Razvozhaev.

Two of the dead were children, while the number of those injured in the incident had risen significantly from 25 to 151, of whom 82 had been hospitalised, Razvozhaev said.

Razvozhaev said Vladimir Putin had dispatched Moscow-based doctors and Emergency Situations Ministry psychologists to Crimea overnight to help treat the wounded, adding that arrangements were being made for 15-20 of the injured to be transferred to Moscow for treatment.

Razvozhaev said the Ukrainian attack on Sunday had been successfully “repelled”, with five missiles shot down in total over the Black Sea coast. The Russian Defence Ministry confirmed that four Ukrainian missiles had been successfully shot down and that a fifth had deviated from its flight path after being hit by Russian air defence systems and detonated its warhead over a beach in Sevastopol.

The Defence Ministry said that the intercepted missiles had been US-supplied ATACMS missiles. A period of public mourning has been declared on the peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014.

Razvozhaev attempted to link the events in Sevastopol on Sunday to those in the republic of Dagestan on Sunday evening, where coordinated terror attacks killed 19 people, including an Orthodox priest, civilians and police officers.

Writing on his English-language Telegram channel on Sunday, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev drew parallels between what he called the two “vile terrorist attacks against our people” stressing that: “We do not differentiate between any of them, whether it is the American authorities, the Bandera regime or insane fanatics”.

The Russian authorities were also quick to implicate Ukraine for the March terror attack on the Crocus City Hall concert venue in Krasnogorsk, near Moscow, in which 144 people were killed and over 550 were injured, even though all but one of those subsequently arrested for involvement in the attack were citizens of Tajikistan.