A glide bomb hits two buses in Kramatorsk and the death toll reaches 30

A Russian glide bomb hit two city buses in Kramatorsk on Thursday morning and killed at least 30 people, Ukrainian prosecutors and rescue officials said. Eighteen people were wounded. Three more people were killed the same morning in Bilenke, a village in the Kramatorsk community. Donetsk regional head Vadym Filashkin ordered public transport in the region stopped.

The regional prosecutor's office said the strike came at about 10am. It hit an area next to a dental clinic on Yuvileina Street, where two city buses were running. Police photographs showed a burned metal shell, debris, and bodies on the road. A second bus caught fire. Some of the dead could not be identified because of the injuries, President Volodymyr Zelensky said. He called the target an ordinary public transport stop and said the strike would not go without a response.

Filashkin was more direct about the choice of target. He wrote that, for Russian forces, a bus with passengers is an attractive target precisely because one strike can kill as many people as possible. The Kramatorsk city council called it a crime against civilians and said no military target was on the street. Al Jazeera's correspondent noted the weapon itself: a glide bomb is a bomb fitted with wings, launched from an aircraft and steered toward an area. It does not have the terminal guidance of a ballistic missile or the camera of a first-person drone. Accuracy is the thing it gives up for range and cost.

Kramatorsk and neighbouring Slovyansk are the remaining large cities in the part of Donetsk region that Ukraine still holds. Moscow claims the whole of Donbas, the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and already controls most of Luhansk and about four fifths of Donetsk. The two cities are what Ukrainian officers call the fortress belt. Kramatorsk used to be a logistics hub for Ukrainian units further east. As the line has moved closer, the city has taken near-daily bombs. Late in August, Ukrainian officials counted as many as nine glide bombs on Slovyansk and Kramatorsk in a single day. Thursday's strike is the deadliest of that pattern, not a new category of attack.

Zelensky used the deaths to ask allies for concrete action in the form of new defence packages. The timing overlapped with a visit by Britain's foreign secretary, Ed Miliband. Miliband stood with Zelensky at Pryluky, the site of a separate strike on a block of flats that killed 22 people, five of them children. He called that attack evidence of Putin's intent and announced further British sanctions on Russia, its war industry, the shadow fleet, oil companies, crypto channels and war financing. He said British support would last as long as it takes for Ukraine to prevail. The sanctions were not drafted in response to the bus strike alone. They landed on the same day, which is how Kyiv will present them.

The operational facts for residents are narrower than the diplomatic ones. Buses in the region are not running. The prosecutor's office has the street, the time and the weapon. Identification of the dead is incomplete. Filashkin has told people still in the city to move to safer parts of Ukraine, an appeal he has made before and that many have already refused or been unable to follow. Kramatorsk is not empty. That is why a morning bus was full.

Moscow's standing line is that its campaign in Donbas is liberation and protection of a Russian-speaking population. Ukraine and its allies reject that account. Thursday's photographs, of a civilian bus burned at a stop beside a dental clinic, are the local evidence against it. The death toll may still move as the unidentified are named. The 30 already counted, plus three in Bilenke, are the figure officials were using on Thursday night.