Kyiv did not take responsibility for the attacks, which could be a bid to broaden a war that has mostly rained ruin and death on Ukraine.
Moscow said it shot down two Ukrainian missiles over southwestern Russia on Friday, including one that fell and exploded in a city center — apparently rare instances of Ukraine using such powerful weapons to attack targets inside Russia.
Coming as Ukraine, within its own borders, steps up its counteroffensive against the Russian invaders, the missile attacks could signal a more aggressive effort to expand a war that until now has brought death and destruction almost exclusively to Ukrainian territory.
Russian officials said one downed missile fell in the city of Taganrog, about 80 miles southeast of the nearest front lines, injuring at least nine people, none severely, and damaging some buildings, and that the other fell in “a deserted area” near the city of Azov, which lies some 25 miles farther from the fighting.
Video and photographs circulated by Russian state media and local outlets showed the aftermath of a blast in Taganrog, a port city on the Sea of Azov, including piles of rubble and blown-out windows and garage doors. The regional governor, Vasily Golubev, said the detonation hit near an art museum and a cafe in the city center.
Earlier Friday, Russia’s Defense Ministry said it had also shot down a drone aimed at the Moscow region.
On Friday evening, at least one missile strike in the city of Dnipro, in central Ukraine, damaged a high-rise apartment building and an office of the Ukrainian security service, and injuries were reported. “Russian missile terror again,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on social media. He added, “These bastards will answer.”
Neither accepting nor denying responsibility for the explosions in Russia, Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to Mr. Zelensky, said that “everything happening in Russia, including Taganrog, is an unconditional consequence of the large-scale war initiated by Russia.”
A top Ukrainian security official, Oleksiy Danilov, in a statement said, “The events in Taganrog are nothing more than completely illiterate actions of the operators of Russian air defense systems.” But there was a hint of sarcasm in his statement, which seemed to deliberately echo the Kremlin denial of responsibility for a missile strike last weekend on a cathedral in Odesa, which it blamed on “illiterate actions of Ukrainian defense forces.”
Ukraine has usually declined to publicly confirm or deny attacks within Russia, which are unnerving to Kyiv’s Western allies, but officials sometimes acknowledge them on the condition of anonymity, or well after the fact.
Both sides reported continued heavy fighting in southern Ukraine, where Ukrainian forces have made piecemeal progress in the counteroffensive that began last month and intensified this week, advancing a few miles along two axes through daunting Russian defenses.
