One person was killed and another injured in a Russian attack on an agricultural enterprise in the Kherson region, the head of the regional military administration said as Ukraine claimed its forces had carried out a successful operation on the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula.
Oleksandr Prokudin said a rocket attack on January 5 on the agricultural enterprise in Kherson killed a 35-year-old man and injured a 60-year-old resident.
Prokudin said "four targeted strikes" also destroyed buildings and equipment.
Russian troops regularly shell the de-occupied part of the Kherson region. Despite evidence and testimony to the contrary, Moscow denies targeting civilians.
In a rare admission of its military operations in Crimea, Ukraine has admitted it carried out attacks on a Russian military command post and a military unit in separate strikes on the Russia-occupied peninsula, saying it had inflicted "serious damage" to Russia's defense system.
Nataliya Humenyuk, the spokeswoman of the Defense Forces of Southern Ukraine, said on January 5 that "really powerful combat" operations took place earlier this week, hitting Russia's military operations in Crimea especially hard.
"Not only one command post was affected," she said in a rare detailing of Ukrainian operations to repel the full-scale invasion Russia launched in February 2022.
"Now they have the same hysteria with movement again. They are trying to maneuver and position both the defense systems themselves and the objects they protect in other places," she added in an interview on the show Social Resistance.
It was not possible to verify Humenyuk's claims.
The attacks on Crimea come after an intensification of Russian missile and drone strikes on Ukraine.
Russian hypersonic and other missile attacks combined with drone strikes blanketed Ukraine on December 29 and again on January 2, killing more than 40 people and injuring dozens more. Ukraine hit back with attacks in southern Russia on December 30. Authorities in the Belgorod region said 25 people were killed.
The risk of air attacks continued on January 5 as sirens rang out three times across the Crimean city of Sevastopol on January 5, though there were no reports of explosions or impacts from drones or missiles.
In the early hours of January 5, the Russian city of Belgorod also was targeted by another round of Ukrainian shelling, officials said, hours after schools in the region were ordered to extend their holiday closures due to the risk of further attacks.
Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov also gave residents an opportunity to evacuate to safer areas. Residents will be helped to move to temporary accommodations in the other cities.
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhaylo Podolyak on January 5 joined the United States in saying that Russia has hit Ukraine with missiles supplied by North Korea for the first time since launching its full-scale invasion.
Podolyak's statement came after the governor of the northeastern region of Kharkiv said that it had been struck by missiles fired by Russia that were not Russian-made.
"There is no longer any disguise. The #Moscow regime is no longer concealing its intentions, nor is it trying to pass off a large-scale war of aggression as mythical 'denazification,'" Podolyak said on X, formerly Twitter.
Russia "is attacking Ukrainians with missiles received from a state where citizens are tortured in concentration camps for having an unregistered radio, talking to a tourist, watching TV shows," he added.
He did not provide evidence for the missiles being North Korean, but his statements come a day after U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters at the White House on January 4 that recently declassified intelligence found that North Korea has provided Russia with ballistic-missile launchers and several ballistic missiles.
Russian forces fired at least one of those missiles into Ukraine on December 30, and it landed in an open field in the Zaporizhzhya region, Kirby said. Russia also launched multiple North Korean ballistic missiles on January 2 as part of an overnight attack, he added.
Kirby also said Russia is seeking close-range ballistic missiles from Iran. A deal has not been completed, but the United States is concerned that negotiations "are actively advancing.”
