Kramatorsk Strike

Russian forces hit two civilian buses in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, on Thursday. At least 30 people died.

The Donetsk regional prosecutor's office put the death toll at 30, with 18 wounded, France 24 reported. BBC News cited rescue officials giving a higher count of 33 dead. Donetsk regional head Vadym Filashkin said Russia had aimed to kill as many civilians as possible, according to BBC News.

Ukraine's national police said Russia hit the buses with a glide bomb, France 24 reported. The strike hit around 10:00 a.m. local time. Kramatorsk is a frontline city in the eastern Donetsk region that Russia has not yet captured, and it has served as a logistics hub for Ukraine's military, sitting inside what Ukrainian forces call the "fortress belt."

Filashkin ordered all public transport in Kramatorsk and neighboring Slovyansk to stop. "We have no right to risk the lives of passengers and drivers," he told BBC News. He urged remaining civilians to move to safer parts of Ukraine.

Kramatorsk's city council called the strike "yet another horrific crime committed by the Russian army against the civilian population." There were, the council said, "absolutely no military targets" at the site, France 24 reported.

A day earlier, a Russian missile hit an apartment block in Pryluky, in the northern Chernihiv region. Twenty-two people died, including five children, BBC News reported. Three of those children were one year old.

President Volodymyr Zelensky offered condolences to the families of those killed. He called for "concrete action through new defence packages" from Ukraine's allies, BBC News reported. Three more people were killed Thursday in a separate Russian strike on Kyiv, the city's mayor said, according to France 24.

Earlier that day, a drone struck a data center belonging to the Russian company Yandex in the Ryazan region southeast of Moscow, starting a fire, France 24 reported. A Yandex spokesperson told France 24 the data center "stopped operating entirely" and some services could be unavailable. No casualties were reported. Ryazan governor Pavel Malkov said two Ukrainian drones were shot down over the region overnight, and a fire broke out at a business in the town of Sasovo.

Both countries have escalated long-range strikes on each other's infrastructure in recent months, targeting data centers and logistics sites, France 24 reported.

Andriy Kovalenko, the former head of Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation, wrote on Telegram that Kyiv was behind the strike on the Yandex facility.

"Two can play at this game," he wrote.