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.