Russian glide bomb attack kills 30+ in Kramatorsk as Ukraine faces surge in civilian deaths

Two buses carrying civilians were struck by Russian glide bombs in Kramatorsk on a day when the front line city had nowhere left to hide. At least thirty people died in the attack, according to rescue officials, with another eighteen wounded. Three more were killed in the nearby village of Bilenke. The regional administrator, Vadym Filashkin, said Russia had deliberately targeted the crowded vehicles—a choice made to maximize civilian death.

Kramatorsk and its neighbor Slovyansk sit along what Moscow calls a fortress belt, territory the Kremlin is determined to seize as part of its broader claim to the entire Donbas industrial region. The city has endured almost daily Russian strikes as military lines have drawn closer to its eastern edge. Glide bombs—fitted with winglets that allow them to coast toward their targets rather than simply drop—have become a signature weapon in these attacks. In late August alone, nine were fired at Kramatorsk in a single day.

The scale of civilian death across Ukraine has accelerated sharply. By August of this year, the UN recorded more civilians killed than had died throughout all of 2025. A separate strike on Wednesday destroyed a five-story apartment building in Pryluky, east of Kyiv, killing twenty-two people. Five were children. Three of those children were one year old. President Volodymyr Zelensky, standing at the Pryluky site alongside UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, said the pattern was unmistakable: Russia was trying to destroy all life in Donbas. Miliband called it evidence of Putin's "evil intent and evil strategy" and announced additional British sanctions targeting Russia's war machine, shadow fleet, oil companies, and financing networks.

The response in Kramatorsk was immediate and desperate. All public transport was ordered to stop. Filashkin appealed to anyone still in the eastern front line region to leave for safer parts of Ukraine. The calculus had become impossible: keeping buses running meant risking more lives. The city council released a statement calling the strike a "horrific crime committed by the Russian army against the civilian population," noting there were no military targets at the location.

Meanwhile, Kyiv itself has become nearly uninhabitable. Russian air raid sirens ring almost without pause. On Thursday alone, four people were killed and two injured in the latest attack on the capital. Children are being pulled out of classrooms into underground shelters. Businesses have shuttered. The metro network briefly halted all service Thursday due to voltage drops from damaged power infrastructure. Water pressure is dropping across the city's right bank because power cuts have disabled the pumping systems. Ukraine's energy grid, repeatedly targeted by Russian strikes, is collapsing in stages.

Ukraine has almost no defense against this onslaught. Interceptor missiles are scarce worldwide, leaving the country unable to stop incoming Russian ballistics. The only warning system available is intelligence—Zelensky had warned this week of plans for a major Russian assault, prompting families to rush toward metro stations for shelter. It is a thin shield. Meanwhile, both nations have escalated long-range strikes on each other's infrastructure. Ukrainian drones struck a Yandex data center in Russia on Thursday, rendering numerous Russian websites inaccessible. Russia continues targeting Ukrainian data centers and logistics warehouses. Zelensky has called on Ukraine's partners to provide "concrete action through new defence packages," but the gap between what is needed and what exists grows wider with each attack.