▶ Watch Video: Russia continues daytime drone strikes in Kyiv
At least 30 people were killed Thursday when a Russian guided bomb slammed into a street near two packed city buses in Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine, according to officials. At least 18 more people were wounded in the attack, the Donetsk region’s governor said.
“There is no doubt that Russia is cynically targeting civilians,” Oleksandr Honcharenko, head of the Kramatorsk military administration, said in a statement, adding that rescue efforts were hampered by Russia launching further attacks with small drones.
Video shared online by Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs showed bodies on the debris-strewn road near the charred, twisted metal shells of destroyed vehicles.
According to the ministry, three more people were killed by Russian shelling in neighboring villages, where emergency services pulled one body from a collapsed house.
It was the second consecutive day of heavy attacks by Russia. On Wednesday morning, a missile hit a five-story apartment building in the northern city of Pryluky, killing at least 22 people. Rescue workers said at least 50 more people were wounded in the strike.
“Russia comes to the Ukrainian land with death. It hits our cities, kills our people and multiplies its crimes every day,” Donetsk Gov. Vadym Filashkin said after the Thursday attack in Kramatorsk, accusing Russia of deliberately trying to “kill as many people as possible.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday in Moscow that he didn’t see a “clear path” to any peaceful resolution to the war, which was sparked by Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the Reuters news agency his country would double down on attacking Russian oil refineries in response to what he said were expanding Russian tactics aimed at forcing people to abandon Kyiv and other major cities by increasingly targeting civilian infrastructure. Zelenskyy stressed that Ukraine would not target Russian civilians.
“We saw documents and we know that they allow them [Russian forces] to attack infrastructure, logistics, and especially to attack in the cities, in the villages, everywhere, roads, schools, hospitals,” said Zelenskyy, “to pressure people to leave the capital, leave different cities. This is the goal of the operation.”
Russia has always denied targeting civilians, despite regular attacks on residential buildings throughout the war. But the foreign ministry in Moscow, in a recent statement, urged foreign nationals and diplomatic personnel to leave the Ukrainian capital, warning of “systematic and sustained strikes against military targets in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities.”
The Ukrainian military said later Thursday that it had hit Russia’s largest oil refinery, 1,550 miles from the country’s shared border in Siberia. The sprawling facility in Omsk, operated by state company Gazpromneft, was last attacked in July, according to Reuters.
Ukraine’s military did not provide details about the strike but said the refinery was supplying fuel to Russia’s forces.
Another Ukrainian strike hit a data center belonging to Russian technology and AI company Yandex on Thursday, which said it was working to restore equipment at the facility after a fire that forced it to suspend operations at the site. The impact brought some of the tech giant’s cloud services down.
Visiting Pryluky in northern Ukraine on Thursday morning, Zelenskyy reiterated his request for the U.S. to increase pressure on Russia, adding that Ukrainian negotiators would visit the U.S. for discussions on Friday and Saturday.
