A Russian guided bomb hit a street in Kramatorsk, in eastern Ukraine, on Thursday, Oct. 8, 2026, where two city buses were operating, killing at least 33 people and wounding 18, regional authorities and the Donetsk Regional Prosecutor’s Office said.
The toll climbed through the day — first 12, then 30 — before the regional authorities and the prosecutor’s office settled on 33 dead. Observers have ranked the strike among the deadliest individual attacks recorded in Ukraine this year.
The Donetsk region took the blow at roughly 10 a.m. local time, when the bomb came down. Russian forces likely used guided bombs against the vehicles, prosecutors said, while police described the buses as having been struck by a glide bomb. Moscow made no immediate comment.
Police put out images showing a road strewn with debris, bodies lying across it and the burned-out hulk of what looked like a bus.
Governor Halts Public Transport
Donetsk Gov. Vadym Filashkin ordered city authorities in Kramatorsk and neighboring Sloviansk to stop all public transport. Residents who remain in the eastern front-line region also drew an appeal from him: leave for safer parts of Ukraine.
“For them (the Russians), a bus with passengers is an attractive target precisely because one strike can kill as many people as possible,” Filashkin said on Telegram.
Rescue crews carried on under further Russian attacks by small drones, according to Oleksandr Honcharenko, who heads the Kramatorsk military administration.
Three people killed by shelling in a village near Kramatorsk were killed in Bilenke, which rescue officials say is part of the Kramatorsk community.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the targeted site as a bus stop. “This strike will not go unanswered,” he said. Zelenskyy appealed for more defense support from NATO countries, and Kyiv faces worsening power outages, with officials urging families to prepare for expected winter blackouts.
Russia’s leadership has no intention of halting the killing, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said. Dmytro Lubinets, who serves as the Ukrainian parliament’s commissioner for human rights, charged that Moscow is systematically destroying the city and terrorizing the residents who have stayed.
Ukrainian cities and towns have been pounded regularly by Russia since its full-scale invasion began in February 2022, yet the country denies targeting civilians.
Al Jazeera correspondent Audrey MacAlpine said glide bombs lack the accuracy that ballistic missiles or first-person-view drones have; as a result, nobody can say whether the buses were struck on purpose. She called the attack one of the largest and deadliest aerial strikes in recent months.
Nationwide Barrage a Day Earlier
A massive Russian air attack across Ukraine on Wednesday, Oct. 7, aimed primarily at the power grid. It killed at least 25 people nationwide, two of them in Kyiv.
A five-story apartment block in Pryluky — in the Chernihiv region, some 150 kilometers (93 miles) east of Kyiv — was struck by a missile that killed 22 people. Five children were among them, three of them only one year old, and at least 50 others were wounded.
Zelenskyy noted the barrage fell on Putin’s birthday, saying Russian forces had destroyed the building as a birthday gift to the Russian leader.
British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband toured the Pryluky site with Zelenskyy and announced new sanctions aimed at Russia’s shadow fleet, oil companies and the financing of the war. At the strike site, Miliband said the attack showed Putin’s “evil intent and evil strategy.”
Mayor Vitali Klitschko said morning drone strikes on Kyiv killed three people and wounded 14, also on Oct. 8. Across the country, according to Zelenskyy, strikes over the previous two days had killed 78 people and wounded 215. Verified civilian deaths in the war number more than 17,000, the U.N. says, adding that the real figure is considerably higher.
More civilians were killed by August this year than in all of 2025.
Ukrainian Strikes and Talks
Drones knocked a Yandex data center in Russia’s Ryazan region offline on Oct. 8, and Zelenskyy confirmed the hit as mirroring earlier Russian attacks. In Bashkortostan, the Gazprom Neftekhim Salavat refinery was set ablaze by Ukrainian forces, who also said they had struck Russia’s largest refinery, in Omsk, Siberia. Overnight, air defenses destroyed 399 Ukrainian drones, Russia’s Defense Ministry said.
Ukrainian negotiators are to travel to the United States for talks on Friday, Oct. 9, and Saturday, Oct. 10, Zelenskyy said, and he urged President Donald Trump to intensify pressure on Moscow.
The war is at a stalemate, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters in Portugal, adding that Washington will keep working to facilitate a settlement. A clear path to any peaceful resolution was not something Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he could see, in remarks on Oct. 8.
Fortress Belt Under Pressure
Kramatorsk and Sloviansk anchor the so-called fortress belt, the backbone of Ukraine’s defenses in Donetsk, and Moscow’s forces have stepped up drone and guided-bomb strikes on both. Russia has demanded that Kyiv surrender the rest of the Donetsk region before it stops fighting, and Ukraine rejects the demand. Most of Luhansk is already under Russian control, and the Kremlin is pressing to seize the rest of Donetsk. The pace of Russian battlefield gains has slowed significantly this year.
For much of the war, Kramatorsk served as a logistics and supply hub for Ukraine’s military. It now absorbs near-daily attack as Russian troops press toward its eastern edge. Glide bombs are fitted with winglets so they travel toward a target rather than simply fall. In late August, as many as nine glide bombs were fired at Kramatorsk in a single day.
