A five-year-old boy was also among 20 wounded after Kiev targeted Bryansk and Belgorod regions with drones and artillery.
Four civilians were killed and more than 20 others wounded by Ukrainian drone and artillery attacks on the Russian border regions of Bryansk and Belgorod on Thursday, according to the local authorities.
Two people lost their lives and two sustained injuries after Ukraine shelled the settlement of Suzemka in Bryansk Region, acting governor Egor Kovalchuk wrote in a post on Telegram.
One of the fatalities was the head of the Bryansky Les (Bryansk Forest) biosphere reserve, he said.
Another “barbaric attack” by Ukraine targeted the village of Belaya Beryozka, killing one civilian and injuring three others, Kovalchuk wrote.
Seven people were wounded in the settlement of Starodub after a petrol station was struck, the acting governor wrote.
In the Klimovsky District of Bryansk Region, a five-year-old boy was rushed to hospital with injuries after being attacked by an FPV-drone, he added.
In Belgorod Region, a Ukrainian UAV hit a passenger bus in the village of Voznesenovka, killing a woman and wounding 11 other people, according to the local operational headquarters.
A total of ten districts of Belgorod Region were targeted by artillery and drones on Thursday, with 72 drones shot down by air defenses, acting governor Aleksandr Shuvaev said.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said earlier this week that Ukraine has intensified its attacks on Russian civilians due to frustration over its continued setbacks on the front line.
“Such a desperate venting of anger will not be able to turn the tide on the battlefield and prevent the inevitable defeat of the Kiev junta,” she insisted.
Moscow previously warned that it would carry out “systematic and consistent strikes” on Ukraine’s military infrastructure, including drone production facilities, command posts, and “decision-making centers,” in response to Kiev’s terrorist attacks, including one in the Lugansk People’s Republic on May 22.
On that occasion, Ukrainian forces struck a college dormitory in the town of Starobelsk in several waves of drone attacks late at night while students were asleep, killing 21 people, mostly teenage girls, and injuring dozens of others.
Last week, Russian forces launched a large-scale missile and drone barrage, targeting defense industrial sites in Kiev, parts of Zaporozhye and Kherson regions still under Ukrainian control, as well as locations in Dnepropetrovsk, Poltava, Khmelnitsky, and Sumy regions. Another major raid by Moscow in late May involved the deployment of two state-of-the-art intermediate-range hypersonic Oreshnik systems.
