Russia’s Air Force Accidentally Bombs Its Own City

Russia unintentionally bombed its own city, resulting in two casualties.

Belgorod, a 340,000-person city close to Ukraine, initially believed it was a Ukrainian attack, but the Russian military swiftly admitted one of its jets unintentionally launched the missile.

Belgorod has frequently been the target of drone assaults that the Russian government has accused Ukraine of carrying out, but the explosion that occurred late on Thursday was unlike anything the city’s residents had ever heard.

Witnesses heard a low hissing sound, then a boom that sent a car flying onto a store roof and caused the neighboring apartment buildings to shake.

The explosion produced a 66-foot-wide crater in the midst of a street bordered with trees and surrounded by apartment buildings, breaking their windows and damaging several cars, and wounding two residents. Later, a third person was hospitalized for hypertension.

Russian analysts and military bloggers were buzzing with hypotheses about what weapon Ukraine had used for the attack as soon as the explosion occurred.

Many demanded severe retaliation.

But approximately an hour later, the Russian Defense Ministry admitted that one of its own Su-34 bombers had accidentally dropped a weapon, which was the reason for the explosion.

It did not provide any other information, but military specialists believed the device to be a potent 500kg bomb. In the explosion on Thursday, the missile was reportedly programmed to detonate briefly after impact in order to strike subsurface facilities.

A nine-story apartment building in the city next to the explosion had inhabitants temporarily relocated, according to Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov, while local officials looked into whether structural damage had occurred that would have made the building unfit to occupy.

An anchor on Russian state television made the mistaken editorial statement after reporting on how local authorities were handling the aftermath of the explosion: “Modern weapons allow Russian units to eliminate extremists in the area of the special military operation from a minimal distance.”

The paragraph that the anchor had just read had left him obviously perplexed.

Russian pundits questioned the warplane’s overflight of Belgorod and asked the military to steer clear of similar dangerous maneuvers in the future.

Some said that the unintentionally dropped bomb may have been one of a group of modified weapons with wings and a GPS-guided targeting system that enable them to glide to targets hundreds of miles away. Such gliding bombs are only recently being used by the Russian air force, and some experts fear that they may have certain flaws.

The crash of a Russian warplane adjacent to a residential structure in the seaport city of Yeysk, which resulted in the deaths of 15, was followed by the explosion in Belgorod.

With warplanes conducting sorties over Ukraine, Yeysk is home to a sizable Russian air facility. Military specialists have observed that as Russian military planes have grown significantly throughout the conflict, so too have crashes and mishaps.

Another terrible event occurred in the Belgorod region when two volunteer soldiers opened fire on Russian soldiers at a military firing range, killing 11 people and injuring 15. The two soldiers were then shot dead.