Photographs published by Telegram channel Dosye Shpiona on Monday appeared to confirm that the recreation centre in Russia’s Belgorod region destroyed in a Ukrainian missile strike on Sunday has been converted into a military facility.
Dosye Shpiona claimed a command node at the former Nezhegol recreation centre had been used to command Russian military units involved in the offensive in eastern Ukraine’s Kharkiv region. It said eight Russian officers remain unaccounted for.
Mark Krutov, a Prague-based journalist with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, posted images on Monday showing the damage sustained in the immediate aftermath of the attack.
In another post, he posted photographs of a Russian serviceman guarding the building in December 2022, and alleged that the Russian military had taken over the recreation centre then and that they had been allowed to remain there uninterrupted until the strike on Sunday.
A Ukrainian source told British broadcaster Sky News that Sunday’s strike represented the first time a warplane had carried out such a strike in the Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine and has come under frequent aerial attack by Ukraine in recent months. It was not immediately clear what kind of weapon was used in the strike and whether it had been provided by a Western country, Sky News said.
The US, Germany and France have all now given Ukraine the green light to use their weapons to launch attacks on military facilities in Russia to defend Kharkiv. Vladimir Putin told journalists on Wednesday that Russia would “reserve the right to act the same way” if Ukraine used Western-provided weapons to attack targets on Russian territory.
