A Russian guided bomb struck next to two public buses in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk on Thursday morning, killing at least 30 people, regional officials said. Around 18 to 20 others were wounded, according to differing accounts, and three more people were killed by shelling in the nearby village of Bilenke. It is one of the deadliest attacks on Ukrainian civilians this year.
The bomb landed near a bus stop on Yuvileina Street, beside a dental clinic. Police images showed bodies lying among debris and the burned-out shell of a bus; a second bus also caught fire. Some victims could not be identified because of the severity of their injuries. Oleksandr Honcharenko, head of the city's military administration, said rescue work was hampered by follow-up attacks with small drones. Donetsk regional governor Vadym Filashkin accused Russia of deliberately targeting passenger vehicles to kill as many people as possible, and ordered all public transport in the area suspended. Kramatorsk's city council said there were no military targets nearby. Moscow had not commented at the time of reporting.
Kramatorsk and neighbouring Sloviansk form a so-called fortress belt, the last two large cities in northern Donetsk region still fully under Ukrainian control. Russia has sought to capture them for over a decade and now aims to take the roughly 20 percent of Donetsk it does not hold, as part of President Vladimir Putin's demand for all of the Donbas, the industrial region made up of Donetsk and Luhansk. Kyiv refuses to cede territory. Once a logistics hub for Ukraine's military, Kramatorsk now faces near-daily attacks, including glide bombs, which are fitted with winglets so they travel long distances to their targets. Filashkin urged remaining residents to move to safer parts of the country, though many have refused to abandon their homes.
The strike came a day after a Russian missile destroyed a five-storey apartment block in Pryluky, a town in the northern Chernihiv region, killing 22 people including five children. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the site with British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, who announced new sanctions targeting Russia's shadow fleet, oil companies and financing, and described the attacks as evidence of Putin's "evil intent". Zelenskyy vowed the Kramatorsk strike would not go unanswered and urged allies to supply anti-ballistic systems, ammunition for fighter jets and interceptors. A Ukrainian delegation is due to meet US representatives Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff to discuss air defence.
The attacks come amid intensified Russian air raids across Ukraine. In Kyiv, four people were killed overnight, power cuts have lowered water pressure, and the metro briefly halted. According to the UN, more civilians had been killed by August this year than in all of 2025. Ukraine, meanwhile, says it has hit Russian targets including the Salavat oil refinery complex and a Yandex data centre, claims that could not all be independently verified.