One killed, seven wounded, including a teenager, in an artillery attack in the Belgorod region.
One Russian civilian was killed on Wednesday in a Ukrainian artillery strike on Solokhi, a village near the border in the Belgorod region. The regional governor said seven more people have been injured on social media. The area is being evacuated.
The village of Solokhi, Belgorod Region, has been hit by shelling from the Ukrainian side, Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said on Wednesday evening.
The situation was the worst since the artillery attacks began, according to the governor.
Preliminary reports said one person was injured and there was some property damage. About an hour after the initial report, Gladkov gave an update: One person had died while three others were receiving medical assistance. The number of injured people grew to seven.
A video and photos from the site that made rounds on social media showed flames. Gladkov said that the village was not on fire and that this was a field set ablaze by the attack. One house was destroyed in the shelling.
Gladkov said that reports of a 14-year-old boy also dying were incorrect, and that the teen was among the injured being treated at an area hospital.
Solokhi is a village of just over 600 residents, about 11 kilometers seven miles inside Russia. It is located north of the city of Kharkov, where Ukrainian forces have been massing over the past several weeks. The residents would be evacuated to a safer place, according to Governor Gladkov.
This is not the first time that the Belgorod Region has been targeted from Ukraine, injuring Russian civilians, but no previous attack has resulted in confirmed civilian deaths.
Russia attacked the neighboring state in late February, after Ukraine s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements, first signed in 2014, and Moscow s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The German and French Minsk Protocol was designed to give the breakaway regions special status within the Ukrainian state.
The Kremlin has demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO military bloc. Kiev insists that the Russian offensive was unprovoked and has denied that it was planning to retake the two republics by force.