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 said Friday that more than 220,000 reservists already had been called up as part of an effort to recruit 300,000.

At least 16,000 of them have been deployed "in units that get involved in fulfilling combat tasks," Putin said a news conference Friday in Astana, Kazakhstan, adding that he expects the mobilization to be completed within two weeks.

Russian media have reported at least seven deaths among people who were recently drafted. Asked 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.

In the continuation of Russian attacks, a missile strike Saturday seriously damaged a key energy facility in Ukraine's capital region, the country's grid operator said. After mounting setbacks, the Russian military has worked to cut off power and water in far-flung populated areas while also fending off Ukrainian counterattacks in occupied areas.

In the Zaporizhzhia region, Gov. Oleksandr Starukh said the Russian military carried out strikes with suicide drones from Iran and long-range S-300 missiles. Some experts said the Russian military's use of the surface-to-air missiles may reflect shortages of dedicated precision weapons for hitting ground targets.

Kyiv region Gov. Oleksiy Kuleba said the missile that hit a power facility Saturday morning didn't kill or wound anyone. Citing security, Ukrainian officials didn't identify the site, one of many infrastructure targets the Russian military tried to destroy after an Oct. 8 truck bomb explosion damaged the bridge that links Russia to the annexed Crimean Peninsula.

Ukrainian electricity transmission company Ukrenergo said repair crews were working to restore electricity service, but warned residents about further possible outages. Kyrylo Tymoshenko, the deputy head of the Ukrainian president's office, urged residents of the capital and three neighboring regions to conserve energy.

In the southern Kherson region, one of the first areas of Ukraine to fall to Russia after the invasion and which Putin also illegally designated as Russian territory last month, Ukrainian forces pressed their counteroffensive Saturday.

Kyiv's army has reported recapturing 75 villages and towns there in the past month, but said the momentum had slowed, with the fighting settling into the sort of grueling back-and-forth that characterized Russia's monthslong offensive to conquer Ukraine's eastern Donbas region.

On Saturday, Ukrainian troops attempted to advance south along the banks of the Dnieper River toward the regional capital, also named Kherson, but didn't gain any ground, according to Kirill Stremousov, a deputy head of the occupied region's Moscow-installed administration.

"The defense lines worked, and the situation has remained under the full control of the Russian army," he wrote on his messaging app channel.

To the north and east of Kherson, Russian shelling killed two civilians in the Dnipropetrovsk region, Gov. Valentyn Resnichenko said. He said the shelling of the city of Nikopol, which is across the Dnieper from the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, damaged 12 residential buildings, several stores and a transportation facility.

Russia's efforts to counter Ukrainian advances by pounding Kyiv and other cities with missiles and mobilizing hundreds of thousands of reservists represent a significant escalation in the seven-month old war, but are unlikely to shift the dynamics of a conflict now clearly tilting in favor of Ukraine, Western intelligence assessments and military experts say.

The missile strikes alone have little strategic value, although they are inflicting widespread human misery and have disrupted lives in cities that have been relatively untouched by the fighting, the assessments say.

Conditions on the battlefield continue to favor the nimbler, more highly motivated and better armed Ukrainian military, which seems likely to retain the advantage over Russia's lumbering, poorly equipped and exhausted army, at least for the foreseeable future.

U.S. and other Western officials predict Ukraine will remain on the counteroffensive well into the coming months, even as the weather forces the pace of the war to slow.

"I expect that Ukraine will continue to do everything it can throughout the winter to regain its territory and to be effective on the battlefield," U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters in Brussels last week. "Most recently we've seen them be very effective both in the east and down in the south as they've taken back quite a bit of territory from the Russians."

The tempo of the fight has already slowed in recent days as Ukraine consolidates the positions it has recently won.

The pace will slow further as winter brings snow and ice in the east and mud in the south to the terrain on which most of the recent battles have been fought, military experts say. At some point in the months ahead, the weather may force Ukraine to halt its advances, said a Western official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive subjects. But for now, "the Ukrainians maintain the initiative and the momentum," he said.

Ukraine's army, which was heavily outgunned by Russia at the start of the war, now outclasses the Russian military by almost every measure, he said, from the sophisticated Western artillery systems it is using to pinpoint Russian targets far from the front lines to the availability and quality of the soldiers it can bring to the fight.

Russia continues to suffer heavy losses of its forces and equipment and is digging into defensive positions while Ukraine is steadily receiving supplies of new and technologically advanced weaponry from its Western allies. U.S. intelligence assessments say Russia has lost 6,000 tanks, armored vehicles and other military equipment during the course of the war, and some of those are being captured intact by the Ukrainians, further replenishing their arsenal.

Ukrainian officials say they have not noticed any discernible impact from those that have already shown up on the front lines, put at 16,000 by Putin on Friday. But they don't discount the possibility that a huge influx of troops could complicate Ukraine's hopes of progress, said Yuriy Saks, an adviser at Ukraine's defense ministry.

"We don't want to underestimate our enemy and we understand that if 200,000 arrive on the battlefield things could change," he said.

There are, however, doubts about Russia's capacity to adequately train and equip such a large number of inexperienced troops, the Western official said. The ones that have shown up so far "have been fielded with very, very limited training and very, very poor equipment," he said. "It's really unlikely they will have any positive impact in the near term."

Even the onset of winter can be expected to favor Ukraine, said a Ukrainian government defense adviser who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he isn't authorized to speak to the news media. Russia is struggling to provide sleeping bags and other winter gear for all its soldiers, while Ukraine's cold-weather allies such as Canada, Estonia and Lithuania are contributing tens of thousands of winter uniforms, he said.

Mobilizing tens of thousands of inexperienced and ill-equipped soldiers into a harsh winter environment such as Ukraine's, where temperatures routinely plunge well below freezing, could lead to deepening demoralization among forcibly recruited soldiers, the adviser said. Moreover, Russia also needs experienced and capable officers and commanders to lead the new men, but its existing leadership ranks have already suffered heavy casualties and are worn down from months of fighting, he said.

"Russia is hoping to get some victories through numerical superiority," the adviser said. "If we want to win this war we should be thinking about technological superiority. It shouldn't be an infantry-to-infantry, Soviet way of fighting.

"We are ready to fight to the end, but at the same time we shouldn't play this game, according to the Russian vision, in which soldiers' lives don't matter," he added.

Russia's capacity to sustain the missile strikes is expected to dwindle, further constraining its options on the battlefield, Western officials and military experts say. In particular, Russia is believed to be running low on the precision-guided missiles that can be used to target key sites.

The Ukrainian Defense Ministry announced Friday that Russia began the war with 1,844 precision guided missiles -- including sea-launched Kalibr missiles, ground-launched Iskanders and air-launched Kh-101s and Kh-555s -- of which only 609 remain. Western officials said the numbers are in line with their estimates.

Russia does still have sizable stocks of unguided missiles that it can use to hit cities, without precision, and it is likely to continue to use them in an attempt to demoralize the Ukrainian population, the government adviser said.

But as long as the strikes are hitting civilians and civilian infrastructure rather than core military targets, "they are not going to turn the tide in this war," said Konrad Muzyka, director of the Poland-based Rochan defense consultancy.

Information for this article was contributed by James C. McKinley Jr. of The New York Times, by Yesica Fisch and Leo Correa of The Associated Press and by Liz Sly and Ellen Nakashima of The Washington Post.

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