Russia drops powerful bomb on its own city instead of Ukraine | CBC News

When a powerful blast shook a Russian city near the border of Ukraine, residents thought it was an Ukrainian attack. But the Russian military quickly acknowledged that it was a bomb accidentally dropped by one of its own warplanes.

Belgorod, a city of 340,000 about 40 kilometres east of the border, has faced regular drone attacks that Russian authorities blame on the Ukrainian military, but the explosion late Thursday was far more powerful than anything its residents had heard before.

Witnesses reported a low hissing sound followed by a blast that made nearby apartment buildings tremble and threw a car on a store roof. It left a 20-metre-wide crater in the middle of a tree-lined boulevard flanked by apartment buildings, shattering their windows, damaging several cars and injuring two residents. A third person was later hospitalized with hypertension.

Immediately after the explosion, Russian commentators and military bloggers were abuzz with theories about what weapon Ukraine had used for the attack. Many called for a powerful retribution.

But about an hour later, the Russian Defence Ministry acknowledged that the explosion was caused by a weapon accidentally dropped by one of its own Su-34 bombers. It didn’t offer any further details, but military experts said the weapon likely was a powerful 500-kilogram bomb.

In Thursday’s blast, the weapon was apparently set to explode with a small delay after impact, to hit underground facilities.

Some residents relocated

Belgorod Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov said that local authorities decided to temporarily resettle residents of a nine-storey apartment building near the blast while it was inspected to make sure it hadn’t suffered irreparable structural damage.

Russia attacked Ukraine overnight with Iranian-made self-exploding Shahed drones, the Ukrainian military said Friday. Russia launched about 10 drones at Ukraine targets, and eight of them were shot down by Ukrainian air defences, Ukraine’s General Staff said.

At least six civilians have been killed and six more have been wounded in Ukraine over the past 24 hours, Ukraine’s presidential office reported on Friday morning.

According to Ukrainian officials, Russian shelling and missile strikes mostly targeted cities and villages in the embattled, partially occupied regions of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Outside of these regions, the Russian forces also attacked the Chernihiv province on Thursday from mortars. Overnight, Russia launched drones to attack Kyiv, as well as the Poltava and Vinnytsia regions.

The Russian and Ukrainian forces have been largely in a stalemate, trading small slices of land over the winter. The fiercest battles have been in the eastern Donetsk region, where Russia is struggling to encircle the city of Bakhmut in the face of dogged Ukrainian defence. Both sides are expected to launch more intensive offensives in the spring.

Britain’s Ministry of Defence said Friday in its daily military assessment of the war that soft ground conditions and mud across most of Ukraine will likely slow operations for both sides in the conflict.

Meanwhile, the United States will begin training Ukrainian forces on how to use and maintain Abrams tanks in the coming weeks, as it continues to speed up its effort to get them onto the battlefield as quickly as possible, U.S. officials said Friday.

The decision comes as defence leaders from around Europe and the world are meeting at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, in the ongoing effort to co-ordinate the delivery of weapons and other equipment to Ukraine. An announcement is expected later Friday.

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U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration announced in January that it would send Abrams tanks to Ukraine — after insisting for months that they were too complicated and too hard to maintain and repair. The decision was part of a broader political manoeuvre that opened the door for Germany to announce it would send its Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine and allow Poland and other allies to do the same.