Did Russian air defenses bring down the Ukrainian drone that killed seven on a Black Sea beach?

A Ukrainian drone came down on a beach crowded with vacationers in the village of Arkhipo-Osipovka near Gelendzhik on the morning of August 3. Seven people died, including three children, and 40 more were injured, 21 of them hospitalized, according to data from the Krasnodar Krai operational headquarters.

The news outlet 93.ru reports that the city’s mayor, Alexey Bogodistov, declared a drone threat at 8:34 a.m. and canceled it just 10 minutes later. Local residents and tourists say the village’s warning sirens never sounded, even though there’s a system in place there. “Yesterday, they were blaring starting at 3:42 a.m. But today, it’s quiet,” the Russian Telegram news channel Ostorozhno Novosti quoted one local resident as saying.

Krasnodar Governor Veniamin Kondratyev wrote on his Telegram channel that the attack targeted civilian infrastructure, saying “drone debris” had fallen in Arkhipo-Osipovka. Footage shot by witnesses at the scene, however, shows an entire drone crashing onto the beach.

Agentstvo, an independent Russian investigative outlet, reports, citing military experts, that Russian air defenses may have caused the drone to come down on the beach — the flight trajectory, in particular, supports that theory. One clip published by the Ukrainian monitoring Telegram channel Supernova+ also captures sounds resembling automatic gunfire; its caption reads: “MOG [mobile firing group] shoots down the drone, and it falls on vacationers.”

Witnesses have confirmed hearing gunfire. “Thank God we left the beach early, with our dog. We were already home when we heard a barrage of gunfire, like from a machine gun, and an explosion. Everything that could shake, shook,” one tourist told 93.ru.

OSINT analyst Kirill Mikhailov told the outlet that the sound of automatic weapons fire dies down just as the drone begins to fall. “So it’s as if a MOG was there and was firing specifically at this drone, but whether it hit it, we can’t see on the video,” he said.

Military analyst David Sharp, who spoke with journalists from the independent Russian investigative outlet The Insider, agrees:

Sharp also points out that the sound of gunfire suggests a protected facility somewhere nearby. That facility could have been the drone’s actual target. He did not specify what kind of facility it might have been.

Agentstvo reports that the beach where the drone came down sits in front of the Rassvet resort, which is a branch of NPO Mashinostroyeniya, one of the country’s key rocket and space enterprises.

“Putin’s Palace” also sits on the Black Sea coast near the village of Praskoveevka outside Gelendzhik, a property FBK, the Navalny-founded anti-corruption organization, described in detail in one of its investigations. Arkhipo-Osipovka lies less than 30 kilometers (about 19 miles) from Praskoveevka in a straight line, though there’s no confirmation the palace was the attack’s target.