Russia targets Ukraine residential block hours after Taganrog explosion

An explosion rocked Russia’s southern port city of Taganrog on Friday, injuring several people and causing damage on a scale Russians are unaccustomed to enduring at home 18 months into its full-blown invasion of Ukraine.

Hours later, Russian missiles struck a high-rise residential building and the regional office of Ukraine’s domestic security service, the SBU, in the city of Dnipro. Authorities said nine people, including two children aged 14 and 17, were wounded in the attack.

Dnipro Mayor Borys Filatov said it was the third time the SBU building had been targeted by Russian missiles.

Videos from the scenes showed large sections of the buildings collapsed and rescuers searching for people in the rubble.

“Russian missile terror again,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on Telegram, adding that he had called a meeting of his top military and security officials.

Kyiv has not commented on the Taganrog strike and its policy is to neither confirm nor deny attacks within Russia. The Russian defence ministry claimed the explosion was the result of its air defences intercepting a Ukrainian missile, with debris from the downed rocket destroying a café and museum courtyard in the city centre.

A second missile was shot down over the Rostov region by air defences soon after, Russian authorities said, with debris landing outside the city of Azov across the bay from Taganrog.

The Taganrog strike follows a week of Russian missile and drone attacks on Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, including Odesa, following Moscow’s withdrawal from the UN-brokered grain export deal.

Ukraine has hit targets inside Russia before, mainly with drones. Cases of sabotage of military supply sites such as oil terminals by partisan groups have also been attributed to Ukraine, while artillery fire has landed in Russian settlements close to the Ukrainian border.

Taganrog is located deeper in the southern Rostov region, about 50km from the border with Russian-occupied areas of southern Ukraine, and nearly 150km away from the frontline. A military air base used by Russia in its invasion of Ukraine is located on the outskirts of the city.

Thousands of Ukrainians from the country’s south-east were sent to camps in Taganrog in spring of 2022, as Russian forces laid siege to the city of Mariupol.

Videos shared on social media showed a ruined building and rubble scattered in the yard of Taganrog’s art museum, as well as a damaged café named after the playwright Anton Chekhov, who was born in the city.

On Saturday Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, or GUR, reported that a fresh explosion had occurred “as a result of sabotage” at a Russian ammunition depot near Cossack Bay in Russian-occupied Crimea, where the 810th separate marine infantry brigade is located. 

The agency, which did not take credit for the blast but has been known to carry out clandestine operations behind enemy lines, wrote on Telegram that “witnesses heard two explosions and the sounds of further detonation of ammunition”. The post was accompanied by a video showing the explosions. The FT could not verify the claims.