Russian authorities said a Ukrainian drone hit a bus carrying a Belarusian children’s football team in Russia’s Bryansk region, a claim Kyiv said was “false.”
Yegor Kovalchuk, the acting governor of the Bryansk region, which is located along Russia’s border with Ukraine, reported that one woman was killed and eight others, including children, were injured in the incident on June 17.
He posted several images from the alleged aftermath site, saying that the woman who was killed had been accompanying the children to the Russian Black Sea resort city of Gelendzhik. Kovalchuk added that all passengers would be returned to their homes in Belarus following the attack.
Ukraine’s military rejected the accusation as “false,” saying that its forces “did not employ unmanned aerial vehicles against targets in Bryansk” during the period specified by Russian officials.
“Unable to achieve its declared objectives on the battlefield and suffering significant losses, Russia is increasingly resorting to information manipulation,” a statement from the Ukrainian military’s General Staff added.
RFE/RL could not independently confirm the reports inside Russian territory.
The Belarusian Foreign Ministry called the strike a “terrorist act” and urged Kyiv to provide “detailed explanations,” while also warning against traveling to areas of military conflict.
Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the exiled Belarusian opposition leader who visited Kyiv for talks with Ukrainian officials last month, expressed condolences to those affected by the incident and called for “full clarity” in an investigation into the alleged strike.
“My thoughts are with the victims and their families […] Russia is not safe, especially for Belarusians. This criminal Russian war must end,” Tsikhanouskaya wrote in an X post.
Meanwhile, Russian air attacks continued to pound civilian and energy infrastructure across Ukrainian regions, damaging a horse-riding school in the Sumy region and killing three horses there.
In a video sent to RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service, a worker at the school said staff had urged children not to come to the facility following the attack, “but some children came here in tears.”
“This is very traumatic for them […] It looks like in a movie about the war, but these are the realities,” she added standing amid destroyed stables.
US President Donald Trump initiated a diplomatic push for a peace deal to end Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine shortly after taking office in January 2025.
Despite several meetings between US, Russian, and Ukrainian diplomats since then, Kyiv and Moscow have remained far apart in their negotiating positions, with the Kremlin sticking to its hard-line stance and offering no compromise on control over Ukraine’s key eastern region of Donetsk.
