At Least Thirty Killed as a Glide Bomb Hits Two Buses
A Russian aerial glide bomb struck two passenger buses on Yuvileina Street in Kramatorsk at ten this morning, about twenty kilometres from the front. The Donetsk regional prosecutor’s office puts the toll at thirty killed and eighteen wounded. All public transport in Kramatorsk and neighbouring Sloviansk has been suspended.
Volodymyr Zelensky says the number may rise, because some of the dead cannot be identified from the severity of their injuries. Three more people were killed by shelling at Bilenke, a village in the same community, which is a separate incident and should not be added to the bus toll. Vadym Filashkin, who heads the Donetsk regional military administration, was explicit about why buses: “For them, a bus full of passengers is an attractive target precisely because a single strike can kill the maximum number of people.” He has suspended public transport across both towns and asked remaining civilians to leave. Moscow has not commented. The pattern matters as much as the strike. Volodymyr Fesenko of the Penta think tank reads it as a change of method: “They used to focus on depriving Ukraine of power, on switching off electricity and heating; now their task is also to immobilise the infrastructure, create a transportation collapse.” The state railway counted 521 locomotives hit since 2022, three-fifths of them this year alone, and trains carry almost two-thirds of Ukraine’s freight. United Nations figures record 15,280 civilians killed or injured in the first eight months of this year, 55% up on the same period last year. Ed Miliband, standing at Wednesday’s Pryluky strike site, called it “Putin’s evil, evil intent and strategy”.