A Russian warplane bombed its own city of Belgorod near the border with Ukraine leaving two women injured and damaging multiple buildings.
Belgorod was struck by "aviation ammunition" from an Su-34 supersonic fighter-bomber jet late on Thursday, Russia's defence ministry told the state-owned Tass news agency.
Footage shows the moment the bomb suddenly slams into the city of more than 400,000, narrowly missing an apartment block.
More video evidence shows a 70ft-wide crater caused by the blast with debris strewn around the scene.
The defence ministry did not confirm what kind of weapon was fired. The planes can carry a variety of munitions, including air-to-air and air-to-surface missiles as well as guided and unguided bombs.
"As a Sukhoi Su-34 air force plane was flying over the city of Belgorod there was an accidental discharge of aviation ammunition," the statement said.
Two women were reported wounded in a disaster that could have been far worse.
A car was thrown by the shock wave onto the roof of a Pyaterochka convenience store.
The blunder was in the Belgorod region, which has become tense because of Putin’s war.
Some 30 people have been killed and 123 wounded here since the start of his invasion as Ukraine responds to overwhelming Russian aggression.
The bomb on Thursday is suspected to have been a modernised FAB-500M62, a Soviet-designed 500-kilogram (1,100 lb) general-purpose air-dropped bomb with a high-explosive warhead.
It is supposed to be “high precision”, and has been used to strike targets in Ukraine.
These munitions have reportedly been rushed into service in the war, and are liable to errors.
OSINT analyst Kirill Mikhailov cited by Agentstvo said: “In order for everything to work, the bomb must first properly separate, then its wings must open properly and the navigation system should work…
“Something went wrong in this process.”
Peter Layton, a visiting fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute and former Royal Australian Air Force officer, told CNN that a pilot may jettison bombs when their aircraft loses power.
But he said Thursday’s incident was “odd” because the munition exploded.
He explained, that in an emergency, ordnance would normally be released in a “safe” mode so it wouldn’t detonate, unless “the bomb’s explosive filing is very sensitive to shock”.
Secondly, a pilot would normally jettison a bomb in unpopulated areas.
“Where the bomb hit; the town centre, not in the countryside, almost suggests accuracy,” Layton said.
In October 2022, an Su-34 fighter-bomber crashed near a multi-storey residential building in Yeysk, in Russia’s Krasnodar region, and caught fire.
Six days later, a Su-30 military plane crashed on a two-story house in Irkutsk.
