A Russian attack on two buses killed at least 30 people and injured 18 others in the eastern Ukrainian town of Kramatorsk near the front line, authorities said.
The local prosecutor’s office on Thursday released photos of bodies and debris scattered on a road, in front of the burning metal shell of a bus.
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Police said the attack took place on a street where two city buses were traveling at the time. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described it as a bus stop and said there would be a response.
“This strike will not go unanswered. Russia is trying to destroy all life in Donbass, and the world must react (…) firmly,” he said on Telegram.
The Donetsk governor accused Russia of “deliberately targeting civilians.”
“For them (Russians), a bus with passengers is an attractive target precisely because a single strike can kill as many people as possible,” Vadym Filashkin wrote on Telegram.
Police said the buses were hit by a hovering bomb. Al Jazeera’s Audrey MacAlpine said that glide bombs “don’t have the precision of a ballistic missile or the first-person view of something like a drone, so they don’t have the same precision as those weapons.”
Therefore, there is no way to know if these buses were intentionally targeted or if they were “in the wrong place at the wrong time,” MacAlpine said.
The correspondent added that it was one of the largest and deadliest air attacks in recent months, “a sign that the frontline city of Kramatorsk is becoming increasingly dangerous.”
Moscow made no immediate comment on the attack. Russia denies targeting civilians, although it regularly shelled Ukrainian cities and other targets during its large-scale invasion that began in February 2022.
Kramatorsk is one of the key cities that Russia has yet to conquer in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, which Moscow claims as part of Russia.
It has been a logistics and supply center for the Ukrainian army for much of Moscow’s war and is part of the so-called “fortress belt” that troops are fighting to retain.
Russian forces have moved closer to the eastern edge of the city, prompting remaining civilians to resettle in safer parts of Ukraine.
The Kramatorsk city council said it was “another horrible crime committed by the Russian army against the civilian population.”
“Once again, the Russians have struck a place where there are absolutely no military targets,” the statement added.
Elsewhere in Ukraine, the death toll from a Russian missile attack on a residential building in the town of Pryluky in the northern Chernihiv region rose to 22, including five children, Governor Vyacheslav Chaus said in a statement on Telegram.
President Zelensky said a cruise missile had directly hit the building in Pryluky, about 150 km east of the capital kyiv.
City Mayor Vitali Klitschko said Thursday that two people were found dead after a fire in a four-story building hit by a drone in the densely populated Solomyansky district.
Klitschko said the attacks, which hit key transportation bridges in the city, as well as the rail and energy network, were “tearing kyiv apart.”
Attack on Russian data center
Meanwhile, in Russia, a drone caused a fire in a data center owned by Russian technology company Yandex, the company told AFP news agency on Thursday.
Unverified images posted on social media showed columns of thick black smoke billowing from the roof of the building, which the company said was in the central Ryazan region, southeast of Moscow.
Russia and Ukraine have stepped up long-range strikes in recent months, with some of the latest Russian attacks targeting Ukrainian data centers and logistics warehouses.
The former director of Ukraine’s Center for Combating Disinformation said kyiv was responsible for the attack on Yandex facilities, writing on Telegram: “Two can play this game.”
The company is Russia’s largest technology company.
Often nicknamed “Russian Google,” Yandex runs the country’s most popular search engine, as well as a food ordering and ride-hailing app used by tens of millions of people across the Russian-speaking world.
Ukraine also claimed to have struck a large oil refinery complex in the town of Salavat, about 1,200 kilometers east of Moscow. The Ukrainian General Staff described the complex as one of the largest oil refining and petrochemical facilities in Russia.
Separately, a man was killed and a woman injured in a drone attack in the Moscow region, regional governor Andrei Vorobyov said. A residential building and three cars were damaged in the attack.
In Russia’s Omsk region, Vitaly Khotsenko, the region’s governor, said kyiv had hit an “industrial” zone. The Omsk region of Siberia is home to an oil refinery operated by Gazpromneft.
Ukraine is waging its own campaign of long-range drone strikes against military, energy and commercial targets in a bid to increase the cost to Moscow of continuing the war.
“A dangerous impasse”
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Thursday that Russia’s war in Ukraine was at a dangerous stalemate and that Washington would continue to work towards a settlement to end the conflict.
“We would like to see a negotiated settlement to this war that is permanent, lasting and just. And that is what we are committed to continuing to do,” Rubio told reporters during a visit to Portugal.
The US official said the escalation could spark a wider conflict.
“This escalation could turn into a campaign of sabotage in neighboring countries that are members of NATO,” he said, adding that other factors “could quickly transform what is a war between two countries into a much larger and more dangerous regional conflict.”
“This war must end with a negotiated settlement. The sooner the better. The United States stands ready to facilitate that. We tried. We will keep trying. But we’re also not going to invest in unnecessary processes if ‘we’ can’t make progress,” Rubio added.
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