Russian glide bombs kill at least 33 on buses in Kramatorsk, deadliest single strike of a surging week

At least 33 people were killed on Thursday morning when Russian glide bombs struck two minibuses in Kramatorsk, a front-line city in eastern Ukraine, according to Ukraine's state emergency service. The strike is among the deadliest single attacks on civilians in the war in recent months and came amid what officials describe as a dramatic surge in Russian strikes across the country this week.

The buses were operating on a scheduled route and carrying passengers when they were hit, local authorities said. Donetsk regional governor Vadym Filashkin said Russian forces were deliberately targeting crowded civilian transport. "The Russians are targeting civilians. For them, a bus with passengers is an attractive target precisely because one hit can kill as many people as possible," he said.

The toll

Early reports from the BBC, citing Filashkin, put the toll at 30, including three people killed separately in the nearby village of Bilenke, part of the Kramatorsk community, with 18 others wounded. Ukraine's emergency service later raised the confirmed death count to at least 33 as rescue work continued, the Kyiv Independent reported. Casualty figures from Russian strikes in Ukraine typically rise over the hours after an attack as search teams clear debris, and officials cautioned the toll could climb further.

The attack was one part of a wider barrage. Russia fired 142 Shahed-type drones at Ukraine overnight, 82 of them jet-powered variants, according to Ukraine's air force. In Kyiv, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said Thursday's strikes killed three people and injured 14, two of them critically. Donetsk's governor said the region had been shelled 31 times in the preceding 24 hours and that 256 people, including 32 children, were evacuated from front-line areas.

A city on the fortress line

Kramatorsk and the neighbouring city of Sloviansk sit inside what Ukrainian officials call the "fortress belt," a heavily defended urban cluster that Moscow has spent more than a year trying to seize as part of President Vladimir Putin's claim over the Donbas region. For much of the war Kramatorsk served as a logistics and supply hub for the Ukrainian military; it now comes under near-daily bombardment as Russian forces advance toward the city's eastern approaches.

Russia has increasingly relied on glide bombs — unguided munitions fitted with wings that let them travel farther than a simple dropped bomb — against Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. In late August, as many as nine glide bombs were fired at Kramatorsk in a single day. Moscow has cast its campaign in the Donbas, made up of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, as the "liberation" of Russian-speaking populations; with most of Luhansk already under its control, Russian forces are now pressing to take the roughly one-fifth of Donetsk that remains in Ukrainian hands.

Following Thursday's attack, Filashkin ordered all public transport in the Kramatorsk and Sloviansk military administration areas to stop running, saying the safety of civilians still in the region was paramount and that "we have no right to risk the lives of passengers and drivers." He urged anyone remaining in the two cities to relocate to safer parts of the country. Kramatorsk's city council called the strike "a horrific crime committed by the Russian army against the civilian population," adding: "Once again, the Russians have struck a location where there are absolutely no military targets."

"Russia is trying to destroy all life in Donbas, and the world needs to react to this. React harshly — exactly as the Russians deserve for all the deaths they have caused," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on Telegram.

Reaction in Kyiv and abroad

Zelensky, who was meeting UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband in Kyiv on Thursday, said separately that "this strike will not go without our response." Miliband's visit had initially centred on a Russian missile strike two days earlier on an apartment block in Pryluky, northeast of Kyiv, in which the death toll has since risen to 22, including five children. Miliband told Zelensky that attack showed Putin's "evil intent and evil strategy" and announced that Britain would pursue further measures against "the war machine of Putin, on the shadow fleet, on the oil companies, on the crypto, on the financing of the war," building on a sanctions package the UK government unveiled in recent weeks targeting Kremlin funding networks, disinformation operations and officials accused of torturing and deporting Ukrainian civilians. He pledged the UK would stand with Ukraine "as long as it takes for you to prevail in this conflict."

The attacks fit a pattern that has alarmed international monitors for months. The European Union has repeatedly condemned Russia's long-range strikes on civilians, citing United Nations monitoring data showing that civilian casualties from missiles and drones rose sharply through the first half of 2026 compared with the same period a year earlier. At an emergency session of the Security Council in August, senior UN officials warned that civilian suffering in the war kept intensifying and called for every diplomatic channel to be used to secure a full, immediate and unconditional ceasefire. Moscow had not commented on the Kramatorsk strike as of Thursday afternoon; it has in the past said such attacks targeted military infrastructure, a framing Ukrainian and Western officials dispute.

What happens next

Ukrainian prosecutors in Donetsk have opened a war-crimes investigation into the bus attack, following the pattern set after earlier strikes on civilian transport in the region. London has signalled that additional sanctions targeting Russian revenue streams and war-crimes suspects are imminent, extending a campaign that has already frozen roughly $500 billion in funds Moscow might otherwise have put toward the war effort, according to the UK government. With public transport suspended in Kramatorsk and Sloviansk and evacuation orders in effect, humanitarian officials expect the strain on displaced residents and emergency services in the Donbas to grow in the coming days, even as Kyiv presses allies for a harder response to what it calls deliberate attacks on civilians.