Six people, three of them children, were killed on a crowded beach near the Black Sea resort of Gelendzhik. Around 40 people were injured, seventeen of them hospitalised. That was announced by the governor of Krasnodar Krai, Veniamin Kondratyev, who described the event as a Ukrainian drone attack.

Kondratyev claims the attack was aimed at civilian facilities and that debris from the downed drone fell on the tourist settlement of Arkhipo-Osipovka. Russian claims about the target of the attack could not be independently verified.

What exactly fell on the people - nobody is confirming

Watch the distinction, because the whole story sits inside it. Footage appeared on social media allegedly showing a drone falling among people on the beach, followed by a powerful explosion. Russian authorities, however, did not confirm that the aircraft fell directly among the swimmers - in their version, the dead and injured were hit by drone debris after it was shot down.

That is an important distinction and it is not accidental. If the drone was shot down above a beach full of people, then the question is not only who launched it - but also who decided to bring it down right there. Neither side is answering that question.

Russian media carry testimony from people claiming the drones flew directly over the beach. One eyewitness described people hiding in panic behind rocks and covering themselves with sunloungers.

Twenty kilometres to "Putin's Palace"

About twenty kilometres in a straight line from the crash site stands the residence that foreign and Russian media call "Putin's Palace" - a luxury coastal complex valued at over a billion euros. The airspace above it is closed to flights, and the Federal Security Service says the measures were introduced because of increased foreign intelligence activity.

So: above the palace - a no-fly zone and a special protection regime. Above a beach full of families - air defence that downs a drone and lets the debris fall on the sunloungers. The Kremlin insists the palace is not Putin's, but a private project of undisclosed businessmen.

The question writes itself: what was the priority in those protection measures?

The numbers from that night

Russia's defence ministry said that between the evening of 2 August and the morning of 3 August, a total of 131 Ukrainian drones were intercepted or destroyed over several Russian regions, Crimea and the Black Sea. The Ukrainian side has so far not commented on the Russian claims.

The day before, in the Belgorod region, a drone fell near a children's playground in the village of Printsevka. A thirteen-year-old girl was killed and two girls aged seven and nine were injured.

A holiday resort in August, a children's playground in a village. This is the third year of a war in which the front is no longer a line on a map, and the beach and the playground have entered the same statistics as the positions.