Russian Strikes Kill 30 in Eastern Ukraine, Including Attack on a Public Bus, as Kyiv Blackouts Worsen
Officials halted public transport in Kramatorsk and Sloviansk after the attacks, a day after a missile strike in Pryluky raised that town's death toll to 22.
Russian strikes in eastern Ukraine, including an attack on a public bus, killed 30 people and injured at least 18 others, authorities said Thursday. The attacks are part of an intensive pre-winter wave of bombardment, and emergency power outages in the capital, Kyiv, are getting worse.
Vadym Filashkin, head of the regional military administration in Donetsk, said public transport in Kramatorsk and the neighboring city of Sloviansk was halted because security had deteriorated sharply. He accused Russia of deliberately targeting civilians. "In such circumstances, we have no right to risk the lives of passengers and drivers," he said. "The safety of residents of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk is above all."
The strikes followed a deadly missile attack a day earlier on the northern town of Pryluky, where the death toll rose to 22, including five children. At least 54 people were injured. Rescuers cleared heavy debris from the cratered section of a residential building while search dogs looked for residents still unaccounted for. Some survivors were forced to sleep in heavily damaged apartments because they could not find anywhere else to stay.
Late Wednesday, Russian drones hit Kyiv's Obolonskyi and Desnianskyi districts, killing four people and injuring 12, including four children, according to police. Bomb disposal teams defused two more unexploded ballistic missile warheads, each weighing about half a ton, that landed near residential buildings.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that Russia will likely escalate its daily missile and drone attacks as winter approaches and appealed to NATO countries for more air defense. "It is important that support in words takes concrete form in new packages for Ukraine's defense," he wrote online. "Supplies of anti-ballistic capabilities, ammunition for our combat aircraft, and investments in interceptors — all of this is directly helping save lives every day."
The energy company DTEK said the national grid operator Ukrenergo ordered emergency outages in Kyiv, separate from the regular rolling outages scheduled across the country. A public awareness campaign restarted this month is urging families to prepare emergency kits, store drinking water and keep off-grid power sources ready for prolonged blackouts.
The war, now more than four and a half years old, has become a long-range aerial contest while the armies remain largely deadlocked on the front line. Ukraine says it hit a large oil refinery and petrochemical complex in Salavat, about 750 miles east of Moscow; its General Staff called it one of Russia's largest, though the claim could not be independently verified. Russian technology giant Yandex said a Ukrainian drone attack damaged one of its data centers in the Ryazan region, knocking the site offline and possibly disrupting online services.
