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Thirty-three people were killed and 18 wounded when a Russian glide bomb hit two civilian buses in the frontline city of Kramatorsk, Ukrainian officials said. The BBC reported the officials’ account of the attack.
Donetsk regional head Vadym Filashkin accused Russia of targeting a bus carrying passengers in an effort to kill as many civilians as possible. Rescue officials said the strike set both buses on fire.
Images released by local prosecutors showed the burned-out remains of a bus, debris and victims on the road. Moscow had not commented on the attack at the time of the report.
Officials order public transport to stop
Filashkin urged people still in the Donetsk region to move to safer parts of Ukraine. He said public transport in Kramatorsk and neighbouring Slovyansk had been ordered to stop because of the deteriorating security situation.
“We have no right to risk the lives of passengers and drivers,” Filashkin said, adding that civilian safety was the priority.
Kramatorsk and Slovyansk are part of a so-called fortress belt that Russia is seeking to capture as part of its stated claim to the whole of the Donbas industrial region.
Russia has frequently cited the “liberation” and “protection” of the predominantly Russian-speaking Donbas as justification for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The region comprises Donetsk and Luhansk. With most of Luhansk under Russian control, the Kremlin is also seeking to take the remaining 20% of Donetsk territory held by Ukraine.
Strike follows deadly attack near Kyiv
The Kramatorsk strike followed a sharp increase in Russian attacks across Ukraine and a rise in civilian casualties. Russia has been carrying out frequent air raids, with air-raid sirens sounding throughout the day in Kyiv.
The United Nations said more civilians had been killed in Ukraine by August this year than in all of 2025, according to the report.
In an attack early on Wednesday, a five-storey apartment building in Pryluky, east of Kyiv, was destroyed, killing 22 people, including five children. Three of the children were one year old.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky offered condolences to the victims’ families and said Ukraine’s partners needed to take “concrete action through new defence packages” to protect the country.
Before the attack on Pryluky, Zelensky had warned of intelligence indicating plans for a major Russian assault. Families in Kyiv responded by going to metro stations for shelter.
Warnings are among the most effective defences currently available to Ukrainians, the report said, as interceptor missiles are in short supply worldwide and Ukraine has limited capacity to stop incoming Russian ballistic missiles.
Russia and Ukraine have intensified long-range strikes on each other in recent months. Russian attacks have targeted Ukrainian data centres and logistics warehouses.
Kramatorsk served for much of the war as a logistics and supply hub for Ukraine’s military, but has come under near-daily Russian attack as Russian forces have moved closer to the city from the east.
Glide bombs have also been used against Slovyansk and Kramatorsk. Fitted with winglets, the bombs glide towards their targets rather than falling directly. In late August, as many as nine glide bombs were fired at Kramatorsk in a single day.
Kramatorsk City Council called the strike a “horrific crime committed by the Russian army against the civilian population” and said there were “absolutely no military targets” at the location.
