In a war that will leave horrendous crimes and infamous images in history, this Thursday Russia blew up two buses full of civilians on one of the avenues in Kramatorsk, the capital of Donbas that still controls Ukraine. Vladimir Putin assured almost five years ago that he was launching his "Special Military Operation" to protect Russian speakers who, according to Russian propaganda, were persecuted by the kyiv government. Today, the Kremlin has once again killed dozens of Russian speakers, which are the vast majority of inhabitants of the cities in the east of the country.
The attack occurred a day after a missile killed five children and 17 adults when it hit an apartment building in Priluki, in the northern Chernihiv region. Photos released by local authorities showed the metal body of the burned vehicles, with images of bodies destroyed by shrapnel and debris scattered across the road. The police indicated that the buses were hit by a gliding bomb or guided bomb, dropped by Russian aviation.
"The Russians are deliberately attacking civilians," claimed the governor of the eastern region of Donetsk, Vadim Filashkin, who accused Moscow of violating "every rule of war and norm of international humanitarian law," the Efe agency reports.
The Kramatorsk City Council called it "another horrific crime committed by the Russian army against the civilian population." "Once again, the Russians attacked a town where there are absolutely no military objectives," he added.
Kromatorsk, which had 150,000 residents before the war, is one of the major cities Russia has not captured in Donetsk, a region Moscow considers part of its territory.
The UN has verified more than 17,000 civilian deaths throughout the war, which began in February 2022 with the Russian invasion of the neighboring country. The world body warned that the real figure is much higher. In the city of Mariupol alone, taken by the Russian army in spring 2022, there were more than 17,000 civilian deaths.
In addition, at least four people have been killed and twelve others have been injured in new Russian attacks on kyiv, according to the Ukrainian Police, while the capital has suffered emergency power outages. At the same time, Ukraine attacked infrastructure on Russian territory overnight, including a data center of the IT giant Yandex and a Gazprom refinery.
Two of the victims in kyiv died after a Russian drone fell between two residential buildings in the Obolon district, where another seven people were injured. In Desnianski, another drone hit a house, killing two women and injuring five other people.
According to the Efe agency, the private energy company DTEK reported that emergency electricity cuts had been introduced in the capital by order of Ukrenergo, the national electricity grid operator. Russia has intensified its attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, as kyiv tries to respond by hitting strategic facilities inside Russian territory.
The new attacks come a day after an intense Russian wave that left at least 28 dead in different parts of Ukraine. In Priluki, Chernihiv region, 22 people were killed and 54 others were injured after a Kh-101 cruise missile hit a residential building. Among the deceased are five children, three of them barely one year old, and rescue teams continue working through the rubble in search of possible victims.
Back on Thursday, in Russia's Ryazan region, Ukraine attacked a Yandex data center in the town of Sasovo. The company confirmed that an incident occurred that affected part of its infrastructure, although it did not specify its causes, and assured that there were no victims. According to independent Russian and Ukrainian media, the incident was related to a fire caused by a drone attack.
Ukraine also attacked a Gazprom refinery in Salavat in the Bashkiria region, according to independent media and Russian bloggers. This is the fourth attack against that facility since the beginning of the war.
The Russian Defense Ministry assured that its anti-aircraft defenses intercepted and destroyed 399 Ukrainian fixed-wing drones overnight over 20 Russian regions, the Crimean peninsula and the Black Sea.
