Seven people were killed and 40 were wounded in an apparent drone explosion on a beach in southwestern Russia, the local authorities said Monday.
Videos on social media, and verified by The New York Times, showed a winged aircraft nose-diving onto the crowded Black Sea beach, exploding on impact and sending some bathers rushing back to shore.
Three children were among those killed, and 21 people were hospitalized, the regional emergency response team said in a statement.
The drone struck a resort in Arkhipo-Osipovka, a warm, rural Russian town that lies in the Krasnodar region. That area is close to Ukraine, and has experienced recent strikes during the war between Russia and Ukraine.
Veniamin Kondratyev, the governor of the region, said Ukraine had been targeting civilians. “This cynical and inhumane terrorist attack against children cannot be justified,” Mr. Kondratyev said in a statement.
It was unclear what the drone had been targeting or why it crashed.
There has been no official statement from Ukraine on the drone explosion.
Russian airstrikes killed about 400 Ukrainian civilians last month, the most since 2022, as part of a summer-long campaign of large-scale aerial assaults. On Saturday, Russian airstrikes on Kyiv Ukraine’s capital, killed at least nine people.
Ukraine has waged its own long-range strike campaign against Russia. At first, it focused on military facilities and oil refineries, but it has gradually expanded its target list to include commercial infrastructure such as warehouses belonging to Wildberries, a Russian version of Amazon. Last week, a Wildberries warehouse south of Moscow was struck.
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