A Russian guided bomb slammed into a street in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk where two city buses were operating on Thursday, Oct. 8, 2026, killing at least 33 people and wounding 18 in one of the largest single attacks in Ukraine this year.
The bomb hit at about 10 a.m. local time in the Donetsk region. The toll climbed through the day — first 12, then 30 — before regional authorities and the Donetsk Regional Prosecutor’s Office put it at 33 dead. Prosecutors said Russian forces likely used guided bombs against the vehicles, and police said the buses were hit with a glide bomb.
Images released by police showed bodies scattered across a road littered with debris and the charred shell of what appeared to be a bus.
“For them (the Russians), a bus with passengers is an attractive target precisely because one strike can kill as many people as possible,” Donetsk Gov. Vadym Filashkin said on Telegram.
Public Transport Halted in Two Cities
Filashkin ordered city authorities in Kramatorsk and neighboring Sloviansk to stop all public transport, and he appealed to anyone still living in the eastern front-line region to move to safer parts of Ukraine. Oleksandr Honcharenko, head of the Kramatorsk military administration, said rescue crews worked under further Russian attacks by small drones. Three more people were killed by Russian shelling in neighboring villages, authorities said.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said: “This strike will not go unanswered.” He described the targeted site as a bus stop. Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Russia’s leadership has no intention of stopping the killing. Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian parliament’s commissioner for human rights, accused Moscow of methodically wrecking the city and terrorizing those who remain in it.
There was no immediate comment from Moscow. Russia denies targeting civilians, though it has regularly pounded Ukrainian cities and towns since launching its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Glide Bombs Over the Fortress Belt
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 region before it stops fighting, a demand Ukraine rejects. Most of Luhansk is already under Russian control, and the Kremlin is pressing to seize the rest of Donetsk. The pace of those 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 were fired at the city in a single day. Al Jazeera correspondent Audrey MacAlpine said such weapons lack the accuracy of ballistic missiles or first-person-view drones, leaving no way to know whether the buses were deliberately hit, and called the attack one of the largest and deadliest aerial strikes in recent months.
A Second Day of Mass Casualties
The bombing followed a massive Russian air attack across Ukraine on Wednesday, Oct. 7, aimed primarily at the power grid, which killed at least 25 people nationwide, including two in Kyiv. In Pryluky, in the Chernihiv region about 150 kilometers (93 miles) east of Kyiv, a missile struck a five-story apartment block, killing 22 people, among them five children — three of them only one year old. 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, who toured the Pryluky site with Zelenskyy, announced new sanctions aimed at Russia’s shadow fleet, oil companies and the financing of the war. Also on Oct. 8, three people were killed and 14 wounded in morning drone strikes on Kyiv, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. Zelenskyy said strikes over the previous two days had killed 78 people and wounded 215 across the country. The U.N. has verified more than 17,000 civilian deaths in the war, saying the real number is considerably higher, and more civilians were killed by August this year than in all of 2025.
Ukraine has answered with long-range strikes of its own. Drones knocked a Yandex data center in Russia’s Ryazan region offline on Oct. 8, a hit Zelenskyy confirmed as mirroring earlier Russian attacks, while Ukrainian forces set fire to the Gazprom Neftekhim Salavat refinery in Bashkortostan and said they struck Russia’s largest refinery, in Omsk, Siberia. Russia’s Defense Ministry said air defenses destroyed 399 Ukrainian drones overnight.
Zelenskyy said Ukrainian negotiators would travel to the United States for talks on Friday, Oct. 9, and Saturday, Oct. 10, and he urged President Donald Trump to intensify pressure on Moscow. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking to reporters in Portugal, said the war is at a stalemate and that Washington will keep working to facilitate a settlement. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Oct. 8 that he did not see a clear path to any peaceful resolution.