Two Men Open Fire on Russian Soldiers During Training, Killing 11, State-Run News Outlets Say

Two men opened fire on Russian soldiers at a training camp in the Belgorod region Saturday, killing 11 and wounding 15, before being killed themselves, according to Russian state-run news outlets.

The Russian Defense Ministry called the episode a terrorist attack, according to RIA Novosti and TASS, which quoted a ministry statement.

The account of the shootings could not be verified independently.

The statement from the ministry said the two men were from an unnamed ex-Soviet nation and fired on other soldiers during target practice at a firing range, RIA Novosti reported.

It was not immediately clear if the attackers were volunteer soldiers involved in the training. Earlier reports suggested they were volunteers.

Law enforcement representatives were working on-site, the statement said.

The shootings come after President Vladimir Putin announced a large mobilization to shore up his faltering war effort in Ukraine, where the Ukrainian army has been recapturing territory in the east and south occupied by Russia.

Putin has said at least 220,000 reservists have been called up. At least 16,000 of them have been deployed “in units that get involved in fulfilling combat tasks,” Putin told a news conference in Astana, Kazakhstan, on Friday, adding that he expects the mobilization to be completed within two weeks.

Russian media has reported at least seven deaths among people who were recently drafted. Asked on Friday why some servicemen had died so soon after mobilization began, Putin said that in some cases training could take just 10 days.

In late September, Putin acknowledged that there had been “mistakes” in how the Russian government had been carrying out his draft. He described cases of people entitled to deferments being wrongly drafted, such as fathers of many children, men with chronic diseases or those above military age.