MOSCOW: Ukrainian strikes, one in a Russian Black Sea resort and another in the annexed peninsula of Crimea, killed a total of 11 people and wounded dozens, officials said.
The death toll from a drone attack on Russia’s seaside village of Arkhipo-Osipovka rose to seven, with three children among them, the crisis task force for Russia’s southern Krasnodar region said on social media. Venyamin Kondratyev, the governor, said earlier that Ukraine had struck the Black Sea resort with a drone.
Unverified social media footage showed what appeared to be a drone crashing into a busy beach at Arkhipo-Osipovka, as tourists looked on from the shore and in the water. Four people were also killed in a Ukrainian strike on Russia-annexed Crimea, the Moscow-installed governor Sergey Aksyonov said in a post on Telegram.
The Black Sea coast and Crimea are both summer destinations popular among Russian tourists. There has been an uptick in civilian deaths in the conflict throughout 2026, the United Nations has reported, as the four-and-a-half-year war grinds on with no sign of a peace deal.
Publisher says eight million books destroyed when Moscow bombed warehouse
Ukraine often fires hundreds of drones into Russia at night, in retaliation for Moscow’s own barrages of drones and missiles against Ukrainian towns and cities.
Russia launched its full-scale offensive against Ukraine in February 2022, and has regularly struck its neighbour, including from the Crimean peninsula. Ukraine has in recent months intensified its counter-strikes on Crimea — seized by Moscow in 2014 — leading to electricity and fuel shortages this summer.
A Russian attack on Ukraine’s Kryvyi Rig — President Volodymyr Zelensky’s home city — killed three people, the governor of Dnipropetrovsk region Oleksandr Ganzha said Among the victims was an eight-year-old boy, he added.
In a picture he posted, firefighters could be seen dousing the flames near the charred shell of a car at a gas station. Another Russian attack, on the southern Odesa region wounded 13 people, said governor Oleg Kiper.
8m books burned
A Russian strike on a warehouse in northeastern Ukraine over the weekend destroyed eight million books, the publishing house said on Monday, slamming it as an attack on Ukrainian culture.
It is not the first time Russia has struck a major publishing centre, drawing accusations from Kyiv that Moscow was specifically targeting them.
“This is the largest loss to Ukraine’s book infrastructure since the beginning of the full-scale war” in 2022, the publisher, Ranok, said. A reporter on Saturday saw firefighters battling to contain the blaze at the warehouse in Kharkiv hours after Russia launched a drone and missile attack.
Published in Dawn, August 4th, 2026
