Russian attack on Ukraine aid center kills 26 as US announces new peace talks | Russia-Ukraine War

Russian forces bombed a humanitarian center in Ukraine, killing at least 26 people, Ukrainian officials said, as the United States announced plans to resume peace talks on November 10-11.

The help center, located at a school in the village of Komyshuvakha in the Zaporizhzhia region, was closed to students because the village is too close to the front line, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Monday. Instead, it served as a shelter and weekly distribution point for aid packages, which residents remaining in the village collected every Monday.

“The Russians struck first just as people were arriving – with a few aerial bombs,” he said in his evening speech. “Then there was a second strike – more aerial bombs, this time on the shelter. A despicable terrorist attack.”

Zelensky said the Russians could not ignore that residents remaining in Komyshuvakha were gathering every week to collect humanitarian packages.

The dead included two members of a rescue team and four police officers, according to Ukrainian emergency services. Five people, including two emergency workers, were being treated in hospitals. Regina Kharchenko, secretary of the Zaporizhzhia city council, said 27 people were missing, and regional police said officers and rescuers were working to reach residents believed to be trapped under the rubble.

Photographs posted online showed smoldering debris strewn across the area.

Warnings of new ‘massive attack’

There was no immediate comment from Russia.

Zelensky said Russian forces could not ignore weekly aid rallies.

“This is further proof that Russia does not want any kind of de-escalation, any real justice,” Zelensky said.

He argued that Moscow had squandered an opening created by a humanitarian mission last week to Oleshky, a Russian-occupied southern town, that was brokered by U.S. first lady Melania Trump.

“If Russia really wanted de-escalation, there was an opportunity, following the situation in Oleshky, to continue taking humanitarian measures,” he said. “We proposed that. But Russia continues to kill people.”

Zelensky also said Ukrainian intelligence had warned that Russia was preparing a new “massive attack” on the country’s energy and logistics networks, timed to coincide with Tuesday’s U.S. midterm elections.

Writing on X, he said Moscow was counting on the world’s attention elsewhere, allowing Ukraine’s difficulties with air defense and Patriot missiles to go unnoticed.

He urged Washington to pressure Russia “in such a way that it has no choice but to end this war.”

Talks in Abu Dhabi

Hours after the attack, U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff said Ukrainian and Russian delegations would meet in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, on November 10-11.

In a social media post, Witkoff said the talks would focus on “post-war security arrangements, de-escalation, humanitarian measures and ending the war.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to the new round of three-party talks after meeting with Witkoff in St. Petersburg on October 21.

The talks come as U.S. negotiators seek a breakthrough before winter in the war, now in its fifth year.

The last US-mediated negotiations took place in February, before the US and Israel launched their war against Iran.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha cited Monday’s attack to urge countries to oppose Russia’s return to elite international sport, after the Court of Arbitration for Sport ordered Russia reinstated in major ice hockey tournaments.

“Russia deserves condemnation, isolation and consequences, not a return to international respectability,” Sybiha wrote on X.

Elsewhere in Ukraine on Monday, drone strikes injured 12 people in the eastern region of Kharkiv, damaging a refrigeration facility, greenhouses and homes, according to emergency services. In the Black Sea port of Odessa, five people were injured when a warehouse was hit and nearby houses were damaged.

The Russian Defense Ministry said its forces shot down 212 Ukrainian drones overnight. The governor of Russia’s Samara region, Vyacheslav Fedorishchev, said air defenses had repelled an attack there, but gave no further details.