A Russian warplane made an “emergency release” of a bomb over a city in eastern Ukraine’s occupied Luhansk region, Kremlin-back authorities said Monday, marking the second instance this month of a Russian military aircraft dropping its explosive payload over a civilian area controlled by Moscow.
“While carrying out combat operations, a Russian Air Force aircraft made an emergency release of a FAB-250 warhead over the city of Rubizhne,” the Kremlin-installed head of occupied Luhansk, Leonid Pasechnik, said on the messaging app Telegram.
Rubizhne, with a pre-war population of 56,000, is located just north of the city of Severodonetsk and around 100 kilometers west of the Russian border.
Pasechnik said no one was killed or injured in the incident, adding that nearby residents were temporarily evacuated from the area where the bomb fell.
He also said emergency crews were “on-site” and working to disarm the jettisoned warhead, suggesting that no explosion resulted in its release.
Monday’s incident in Luhansk comes less than a week after a Russian warplane made a similar “emergency release” of its explosive payload over a village in western Russia’s Voronezh region.
Several buildings were destroyed in that incident, but no one was killed or injured, according to local authorities.
