Ukraine’s armed forces have confirmed a Russian missile strike hit a military training unit, causing a number of casualties.
Ukrainian ground forces said late on Tuesday that three service personnel were known to have been killed and 18 had been wounded.
The military did not say where the training ground was located, although one Ukrainian war reporter, Andrei Taplienko, said it was in the Chernihiv region north of Kyiv which borders both Russia and Belarus.
Russia’s ministry of defence released video of what it claimed was a strike by an Iskander ballistic missile in a wooded area that involved more than 20 cluster-type explosions.
The video could not be immediately verified but the Russian MOD claimed that the number of Ukrainian casualties was far higher than Ukraine’s military had said. There has been no further word from the military since late on Tuesday.
“Despite the security measures taken, unfortunately it was not possible to completely avoid losses among the personnel,” Ukraine’s ground forces said in a statement on social media.
It is the third Russian attack on a Ukrainian training unit in little more than two months.
An Iskander missile attack on a camp in the norther border region of Sumy killed six servicemen in May and another strike killed 12 people and wounded another 60 last month.
Protecting Ukrainian troops on exercises is particularly sensitive for the military, which said it would investigate whether the “actions or inaction of officials” had led to deaths or injuries in Tuesday evening’s missile strike.
The commander of ground forces Mykhailo Drapatyi resigned after last month’s deadly attack, saying that the victims had been “young guys from a training battalion” and that most of them had been in shelters at the time.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian authorities said a sixth person died in hospital from wounds he suffered during a Russian missile strike on a humanitarian aid point in the Kharkiv region on Tuesday.
Ukrainian reports said that four men and two women were fatally wounded while queuing for water. Officials said the missile started a fire that engulfed a shop in the village of Novoplatonivka.
