An overnight Ukrainian drone attack on the Russian border city of Belgorod killed two people and injured 13, and a third person was killed near Shebekino, Reuters reported on Sunday, citing local authorities — three killed and 14 injured across the Belgorod region in one night. Belgorod regional governor Alexander Shuvayev said the attack "has damaged 30 blocks of flats, 35 cars, four houses, three administrative buildings, eight commercial premises and three social facilities." The figures come from the Russian regional authorities via Reuters; the Reuters report carried no Ukrainian comment on the attack, and Kyiv had not confirmed or described the operation in the reporting opened for this article.
What happened in Belgorod overnight?
The attack struck Belgorod city, which lies roughly 40 kilometres from the Ukrainian border and has been a repeated target of cross-border strikes throughout the war, in the early hours of Sunday, October 25. Local authorities said two people were killed and 13 injured in the city itself, Reuters reported. Another person was killed and one injured in a village near the town of Shebekino, elsewhere in the region, the authorities said. Italy's ANSA news agency, reporting earlier on Sunday morning, had put the Belgorod death toll at one person; the Reuters report, published at 08:04 UTC, is the fuller later accounting from the regional authorities, and the two counts are published here in that sequence rather than reconciled. Shuvayev's damage tally — 30 apartment blocks among the buildings hit — describes an attack that reached deep into residential districts of the city, not only its outskirts. Reuters did not report how many drones were launched or how many were intercepted, and no figure for either is published here.
What happened on the Ukrainian side of the border?
The Belgorod attack came in the same cycle of strikes that has been hitting Ukrainian cities through the weekend. On Saturday, October 24, a Russian drone struck a residential building in the Synelnykove district of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, killing three civilians and injuring 12 others, Governor Oleksandr Hanzha reported, in reporting by the Kyiv Independent. The drone set fire to the building's fourth floor and damaged nearby vehicles and a store; among the wounded was an 11-year-old girl, five of the injured were taken to hospital, and three — two women and one man — were in serious condition and undergoing surgery, Hanzha said. La Repubblica reported that a Russian drone attack in Kharkiv killed one person and injured four others, and ANSA reported a Russian attack on industry in Vinnytsia, in west-central Ukraine, caused damage and power outages. The Kyiv Independent has reported that Russia intensified its aerial bombardment across Ukraine in October, targeting the power grid as temperatures fall; thousands of homes in the Synelnykove area lost power after an attack on energy infrastructure overnight on October 21. Taken together, the weekend's reported toll — three killed in Belgorod region and at least four killed in Ukraine in the incidents above — is the civilian cost of a drone war that both sides are now waging against each other's cities at a scale neither was capable of when the full-scale invasion began in 2022. The Oleshky local ceasefire both militaries confirmed last week is due to take effect on Monday, October 27, in one Kherson-region town; it does not cover the air war over Belgorod, Kharkiv or Dnipropetrovsk, and nothing in Sunday's reporting suggests the overnight exchanges are slowing ahead of it.
This report is drawn from Reuters' October 25, 2026 report, published 08:04 UTC and opened and read in full via the verbatim Reuters carriers kwsn.com and srnnews.com; ANSA and La Repubblica reporting of October 25, 2026, opened and read in full via 24SIGNAL; and the Kyiv Independent's October 24, 2026 report, opened and read in full via zot.news. The Belgorod toll and damage figures are those of the Belgorod regional authorities as reported by Reuters and are attributed as such; ANSA's earlier lower count is published alongside them in sequence. The Synelnykove figures are those of the Dnipropetrovsk regional governor as reported by the Kyiv Independent. No Ukrainian military statement on the Belgorod attack appeared in the reporting opened, and none is implied.
