Russian attacks on Ukraine’s southeast yesterday killed eight people and injured more than two dozen others, officials said, with Kyiv accusing Moscow of escalating strikes instead of agreeing to an Easter ceasefire.
Moscow’s troops targeted two buses in the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, its governor Oleksandr Ganzha said on the Telegram messaging app.
A small FPV (first-person-view) drone smashed into a bus approaching a stop in Nikopol’s city centre, he said, and later another bus came under attack in a neighbouring community.
Four people were killed in Nikopol and at least 16 were injured, officials said, adding that five people were injured when the second bus was hit.
“When such terror against people and lives occurs daily, blocking new sanctions against Russia, attempting to weaken existing ones, and trading with Russia all look bizarre,” President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on X.
The images from Nikopol he shared showed the burnt bus with smashed windows.
Bodies lay on the pavement nearby as rescuers were helping the injured.
In the southern city of Kherson, less than 5 kilometres from the frontline, a non-stop half-hour Russian attack on a residential area killed four elderly people and injured seven more, regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said on Telegram.
Ukrainian officials and human rights organisations have accused Moscow’s troops of deliberate and systemic FPV drone attacks on civilians, in particular in Kherson.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian drone strikes killed five civilians, including a 12-year-old boy and his parents, and struck a school in a part of southeastern Ukraine controlled by Russian forces, Russian officials said yesterday.
The 12-year-old boy and his parents were killed in their apartment in an overnight Ukrainian drone strike on Russia’s Vladimir region, Alexander Avdeev, the regional governor, and local officials said.
In part of Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia in southeast Ukraine, Yevgeny Balitsky, the Moscow-backed governor, said that Ukrainian drones had struck a school in the village of Velikaya Znamenka, seriously injuring six people, five of them children.
A local official had been killed while helping the children evacuate the school building, Balitsky said.
A woman in her fifties had also been killed at home in a Ukrainian drone strike on part of Russian-controlled Kherson, Vladimir Saldo, the Moscow-backed governor, said.
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