LUGANSK, September 18. /TASS/. The Kiev regime asserted that Russia attacked Yuriev Park in Kharkov, but in fact it was hit by a Ukrainian air-defense missile, said Yevgeny Lisnyak, deputy head of the Kharkov Region's civilian-military administration.

"On August 31, 2024, the forces of the Ukrainian air defense system carried out a false launch of an anti-aircraft guided missile, which hit civilian objects in the area of Yuriev Park in Kharkov. The strike on the park was presented as the result of hits by the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. Overnight, employees of the housing maintenance service closed off the central part of the park to clean up the consequences of the strike, which they used as an opportunity to hastily remove any traces of the submunition of the Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile from children's playgrounds, in order to subsequently declare the Russian side guilty of civilian deaths," he told reporters.

He said Ukrainian news media, when reporting on the incident, used footage of a strike on a Ukrainian military site instead of the video of the missile's hit at the park.