Thirty-three people were killed and 18 wounded Thursday when Russian glide bombs struck two civilian buses in Kramatorsk, a city on Ukraine’s eastern front. Rescue officials said the attack sparked fires in both buses, which were packed with passengers. Vadym Filashkin, head of the Donetsk region, accused Russia of deliberately trying to kill as many civilians as possible.
Thursday’s attack comes against a backdrop of a dramatic surge in Russian strikes across Ukraine and a significant increase in civilian casualties. According to UN data, more civilians have been killed in Ukraine through August this year than in all of 2025. On Wednesday, 22 people—including five children, three of them just one year old—were killed when a strike destroyed a five-story apartment building in Pryluky, east of Kyiv.
Kramatorsk and the neighboring city of Sloviansk are part of a “fortress belt” Russia is trying to capture as part of Vladimir Putin’s claim to all of Ukraine’s industrial Donbas region. Moscow has not yet responded to the latest attack. Filashkin called on anyone still in the Donetsk region to move to safer areas of Ukraine and ordered all public transportation in the region halted.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed condolences to the victims’ families and called on Ukraine’s partners to provide “concrete action through new defense packages to protect Ukraine.” Zelensky warned this week of intelligence pointing to plans for a major Russian offensive, prompting families in Kyiv to seek shelter in metro stations.
Kramatorsk has served for most of the war as a logistics and supply hub for the Ukrainian military, but now faces near-daily Russian attacks as Russian forces advance toward the city from the east. Glide bombs—equipped with wings that allow them to glide toward their target—were fired at Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. The Kramatorsk city council described the strike as “a terrible crime committed by the Russian army against the civilian population,” emphasizing that “once again, the Russians attacked a location where there are no military targets whatsoever.”