Ukraine drone hits Crimean ammunition depot as Russian strikes kill eight

Russian rockets are launched against Ukraine from Russia’s Belgorod region, seen from Kharkiv, Ukraine (Vadim Belikov/AP)

A Ukrainian drone hit an ammunition depot in central Crimea on Saturday, sparking an explosion less than a week after a pre-dawn strike on a key bridge linking the peninsula to Russia prompted Moscow to exit a landmark grain export deal and pound Ukraine’s seaports with drones and missiles.

Sergey Aksyonov, the Kremlin-appointed head of Crimea, the territory that Moscow illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014, said in a Telegram post that there were no immediate reports of casualties but that authorities were evacuating civilians within a five-kilometre (three-miles) radius of the blast site.