Kyiv, Ukraine — An explosive device carried by drones detonated at the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet on Sunday, injuring six people, officials said.
The explosion at the headquarters of the city of Sevastopol on the Crimean peninsula that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014 led to the cancellation of the Russian Navy Day celebrations.
The press service of the Black Sea Fleet said that the drone appeared to be homemade. He called the explosive device “low-powered,” but Sevastopol Mayor Mikhail Razvozhaev said six people were injured in the blast.
There was no immediate information on where the drone began its flight; Sevastopol is about 170 kilometers (100 miles) south of mainland Ukraine, and Russian forces control much of the mainland along the Black Sea.
Fighting continued elsewhere in Ukraine. The mayor of the main port city of Mykolaiv, Vitaliy Kim, said the bombings killed one of Ukraine’s richest men, Oleksiy Vadatursky, and his wife. Vadatursky ran a grain production and export business.
In the Sumy region of northern Ukraine, near the Russian border, a shelling killed one person, the regional administration said.
Three people were killed in attacks in the past day in the Donetsk region, which is partly under the control of Russian separatist forces, Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said on Twitter on Sunday that footage from a prison where at least 53 Ukrainian prisoners of war were killed in an explosion on Friday indicated that the explosion came from the Olenivka building, which is under Russian control. .
Russian officials have claimed that the building was attacked by Ukraine with the aim of silencing prisoners of war who might be providing information about Ukrainian military operations.
Satellite photos taken before and after the attack show that a small, square building in the middle of the Olenivka prison complex was demolished, the roof in splinters.
Podolyak said those images and the lack of damage to adjacent structures showed the building was not attacked from the air or by artillery, and claimed the evidence was consistent with a hyperbaric bomb fired at the building. interior
