Russian drone strike kills 14 on Ukrainian rail platform

KYIV/DNIPRO: A Russian drone strike killed at least 14 people on a crowded rail platform in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro on Thursday and five in daytime strikes on two other cities, officials said, even as a local truce in Kherson raised cautious hopes for a resumption of diplomacy.

Two teenage girls were killed on a central street in Chernihiv in northern Ukraine, and three people died in strikes on residential buildings in the central city of Kremenchuk.

“Russia is deliberately hunting civilians: on trains, at stations, in residential buildings,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Sergiy Koretskyi said on the Telegram app.

“There is no justification for this terror, and there never can be.”

The six-day truce brokered with US help applied only to southern Ukraine’s Kherson region, where a humanitarian mission was underway to provide relief to the Russian-held town of Oleshky, marooned in a war zone since the start of Russia’s 2022 invasion.

At least 32 killed in Ukraine, Zelenskiy condemns one of Russia’s most ‘vile strikes’

Elsewhere, Russian drone and missile attacks on critical infrastructure including the rail network have upended civilian life and ravaged the economy. The strikes have exploited an acute shortage of air defence missiles.

Bodies scattered across platform

In Dnipro, state railway Ukrzaliznytsia said a jet-powered drone had struck a platform at the city’s main station, where a commuter train was preparing to depart.

Mangled bodies lay scattered across the shrapnel-marked pavement, where patches of bright red blood had pooled up. Police filled black body bags amid the wail of an air-raid siren.

“And for what? What goal are they (Russians) trying to achieve?” said Svitlana Shcherbak, a 67-year-old traveler sheltering underground at the station. “I don’t understand it at all.”

Moscow denies hitting non-military targets, despite a mounting bombing campaign against Ukrainian cities that regularly kills civilians.

New strikes across Ukraine

In Chernihiv, in addition to the two dead teenagers, 23 people including four children were wounded in a drone attack on a busy downtown street.

Russia strikes Ukraine’s Kyiv in fresh wave of attacks

“Ordinary, peaceful people were attacked who were just going to work, going about their daily business, making plans for the day,” said Dmytro Bryzhynskyi, head of the city’s military administration.

In Kremenchuk, strikes on a residential block and private buildings killed three people and wounded 32, the regional governor said.

Russian drones also struck city buses in three separate attacks on southeastern Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia, wounding six, officials there said.

Thursday’s strikes came amid renewed efforts to revive US-backed peace talks to end Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War Two.

New three-way talks are expected to take place this month, with Ukrainian officials including top presidential adviser Kyrylo Budanov urging new pressure on Moscow from Kyiv’s partners.

“The deliberate mass killing of civilians right on the streets and in residential buildings in several Ukrainian cities in a single day — these are Russia’s ‘arguments’ in negotiations,” he wrote on X.