Kyiv, Ukraine – A Russian glide bomb struck two passenger buses in the eastern Ukrainian town of Kramatorsk on Thursday morning, killing at least 30 people and wounding 18, regional authorities said.
Ukrainian officials said the attack was deliberate. When dropped from planes on the Russian side of the front line, such bombs can glide to fixed coordinates on the ground, in this case, a street in the town that lies about 20 kilometres (12.4 miles) from the front line.
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“The Russians are deliberately targeting civilians,” regional administration head Vadym Filashkin wrote on Telegram. “For them, a bus full of passengers is an attractive target precisely because a single strike can kill the maximum number of people.”
“Russia consciously disregards all conceivable rules of warfare and norms of international humanitarian law. It selects targets where it can inflict the greatest suffering on civilians,” he wrote.
Filashkin ordered the suspension of the movement of all public transportation in Kramatorsk and neighbouring Sloviansk as Russia intensifies attacks, paralysing Ukraine’s transport infrastructure, from trains and minibuses to gas stations, bridges, seaports and freight ships.
“This is a new Russian tactic,” Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Kyiv-based Penta think tank, told Al Jazeera. “They used to focus on depriving Ukraine of power, on switching off electricity and heating; now their task is also to immobilise the infrastructure, create a transportation collapse.”
“Unfortunately, Russia’s tactic has a certain effect with their strikes on railroads, gas stations,” he said. “They coerce to peace on their conditions.
“They also strike the public psychologically, disrupt the usual lifestyle in general.”
Throughout the war, Russia has denied it targets Ukrainian civilians, a statement that means little to Ukrainians. During the first eight months of 2026, 15,280 civilians were killed or injured, according to the United Nations – a toll that is 55 percent higher than during the same period in 2025.
With no civilian planes in the sky since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion, trains, buses and trucks have become a lifeline for Ukrainian civilians and businesses, as well as for transporting military and humanitarian supplies.
Trains handle almost two-thirds of Ukraine’s freight volumes, including the export of steel slabs, grains and vegetable oils that keep the economy afloat.
At least 521 locomotives have been hit by drones and shelling since 2022, three-fifths this year alone, Ukrzaliznytsia, the state-run railway monopoly, said in late September.
Some locomotives were struck while in motion, and drones have occasionally hit passenger carriages, causing fires, deaths and injuries.
The largest such attack killed five passengers in January in the northeastern Kharkiv region, an act of “terrorism” that was “not militarily justified”, said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
‘The Russians improved their comms’
Hitting moving trains and buses has become possible because a new generation of Russian drones are no longer the slow, unmanned aircraft that can be jammed electronically or shot down with a machinegun or even an assault rifle.
Jet-powered, with bigger payloads, they are piloted by human operators who use a wireless mesh network, in which each drone serves as a relay node.
“They’re operated manually. The Russians improved their comms,” Andriy Pronin, one of the pioneers of drone warfare in Ukraine, told Al Jazeera.
Occasionally, the signal reaches the drones through a modem on the ground, on a rooftop or even inside somebody’s apartment – switched on by Ukrainians recruited by Russian intelligence, he said.
Locating the modems before attacks is “complicated, but doable”, Pronin said.
According to Ukrainian intelligence, prosecutors and officials, hundreds of recruits, including teenagers, have been offered money via Telegram. They often did not realise the consequences of their actions and have been arrested and convicted.
The video feed and geolocation are often backed by smuggled Ukrainian SIM cards or signals from mobile phone providers in neighbouring, pro-Moscow Belarus, officials believe. These drones can now get almost anywhere in Ukraine, including once-safe western regions.
A train carrying former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson crossed into Poland on September 14, just 30 minutes before a Russian drone struck another passenger train’s locomotive at Yahodyn train station in western Ukraine. Former CIA chief David Petraeus was on a nearby train and reportedly described the attack as “terrifying” and “the act of a truly barbaric leader”.
Ukrainian civilians are equally terrified.
When a daytime Russian drone attack began on September 23, Alyna realised that her workplace was in the most vulnerable place in Kyiv’s central railway station.
She works in a cafeteria located almost in the middle of a massive overpass that stretches above 14 main tracks between the station’s main buildings.
The howling air raid siren and the booms of exploding jet-powered kamikaze drones sent the 24-year-old Kyiv resident scurrying down the stairs and farther on to the subway station.
The drones hit a nearby market, sending black plumes of smoke into the sky and burning to the ground the rotund, modernist building known as the Puck.
“Everything was whistling and rattling above me,” Alyna told Al Jazeera just after another air raid alert ended and passengers began re-entering the station. She withheld her last name for security purposes.
Minutes after the conversation, one more air raid siren forced the passengers out of the railway station, and a drone hit by an interceptor turned into a black cloud in the sky a couple of kilometres east of the building.
The attacks are not limited to trains – Russian drones target petrol stations, buses and minibuses, and seaports, paralysing Ukraine’s exports of grain, vegetable oils and steel.
“You go to a minibus and can hear how [drones] buzz right next to it,” Tetiana Melikhova, a university professor in Zaporizhzhia, a southeastern city with a pre-war population of 720,000, told Al Jazeera.
Her 18-year-old student, Tetiana Bubynets, and two other civilians aged 31 and 48 were killed by an AI-driven drone that was programmed to strike a petrol station on July 6.
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