Strong 6.6 Quake Rocks Russia's Siberia

A strong earthquake on Tuesday hit Russia's Siberian region of Tyva on the border with Mongolia but caused no casualties or damage, Russian officials said.

A 6.6-magnitude quake shook southwestern Siberia some 94 kilometers east of Tyva's main city of Kyzyl, U.S. seismologists earlier said.

The shallow quake, which struck at 10:21 pm (1521 GMT), hit at a depth of six kilometers, the U.S. Geological Survey said in a statement.

The Russian emergencies ministry confirmed that a strong earthquake hit Tyva.

"According to preliminary information, there are no casualties or destruction," a spokesman for the Siberian branch of the emergencies ministry, told Agence France Presse. He declined to give further details.

The ITAR-TASS news agencies said residents of the larger Siberian cities of Krasnoyarsk and Abakan, hundreds of kilometers from Kyzyl, had reported feeling tremors but there were no reports of damage there.

The epicenter of the quake was in a sparsely populated region near the border with Mongolia.