According to Russian states media, more than 3,000 people were evacuated from residential structures in the Russian city of Belgorod on Saturday after a bomb was discovered nearby the location that the Russian air force unintentionally struck earlier this week.
According to TASS, explosion experts evaluated the gadget and determined that there was no threat of an explosion.
Vyacheslav Gladkov, the regional governor of Belgorod, announced on his Telegram channel that the device had been taken out of the area and that residents were going back to their apartments.
Late on Thursday, a Russian warplane dropped a bomb on Belgorod – a city of more than 400,000 people close to the border with Ukraine – leaving a large crater, blowing a car onto a roof and damaging nearbybuildings.
Two people were reported injured in the explosion, local officials said.
State media blamed an “accidental” or “emergency” drop of munition for the incident.
It has not been confirmed whether the device discovered this weekend was also dropped on Thursday.
Peter Layton, a visiting fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute and former Royal Australian Air Force officer, said the incident on Thursday was “odd.”
He said a pilot would normally release ordnance in a “safe” mode so it would not detonate and try to do so in an unpopulated area.
The Belgorod region has been the scene of several explosions and bombings since Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine in February 2022. The city was one of Russian troops’ staging areas in the run up to the invasion.