A glide bomb kills 33 people on buses in Kramatorsk
Donetsk governor Vadym Filashkin said 33 people were killed and 18 wounded when a Russian guided bomb hit a street in Kramatorsk where two passenger buses were travelling. Public transport in Kramatorsk and Sloviansk was ordered to stop. Three more people died in Bilenke.
Kramatorsk3 min read
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A Russian guided bomb struck a street in Kramatorsk on Thursday morning where two passenger buses were travelling. Donetsk regional head Vadym Filashkin said 33 people were killed and 18 wounded. The strike set fire to both buses and to an open area beside them. Rescuers put the fires out and treated the injured.
Ukraine's State Emergency Service and the Donetsk prosecutor's office carried the same rising count through the morning. An early report put the dead at 12 and the injured at 14. By 12:36 Kyiv time the prosecutor's office said 30 were dead and 18 injured. The emergency service later put the dead at 33, with the injured still at 18. Filashkin used that later figure in a public statement.
The munition was identified by Ukrainian authorities as a UMPB D-30 SN guided bomb, a glide bomb fitted with wings so it can travel toward a target rather than fall on a ballistic path. The strike was reported at about 10:00. Kramatorsk City Council called it a crime against the civilian population. Filashkin said the buses were carrying passengers and accused Russian forces of aiming at them to kill as many civilians as possible.
Three more people were killed in Bilenke, a village in the Kramatorsk community. Rescuers recovered one of those victims from the rubble of a private house. The Bilenke deaths are separate from the bus count in the way officials have described them, and they sit in the same morning's attack on the community.
Filashkin then ordered public transport to stop in Kramatorsk and in neighbouring Sloviansk. He said the security situation had deteriorated sharply and that the administrations had no right to risk the lives of passengers and drivers. The order is practical as well as political. Kramatorsk and Sloviansk are the two largest cities still held by Ukraine in northern Donetsk region. They are the administrative and logistics towns of the line Moscow calls a fortress belt, the set of urban positions on the way to the rest of Donbas.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said the strike would not go without a response. He said Russia was trying to destroy all life in Donbas and that the world needed to react harshly. UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband was among the officials named in early coverage of the strike. The public record so far is the Ukrainian count, the weapon type, and the transport halt, not a named allied package tied to this morning.
The bus strike is a different attack from Wednesday's missile hit on a five-storey block in Pryluky, in Chernihiv region, where 19 people died, five of them children, inside a national overnight toll that Ukrainian officials put between 25 and 28. Thursday's bomb fell on a front-line city. Wednesday's missile fell far behind the combat zone. The two strikes, a day apart, hit different kinds of target with different weapons: a guided bomb on street traffic in Donetsk, a missile on a residential block in the north.
Glide bombs have already been used against Kramatorsk and Sloviansk through the late summer. In late August as many as nine were fired at Kramatorsk in a single day. The wing kit lets a bomb be released from outside the reach of many short-range air defences and still steer. A bus on a city street has no shelter once the bomb is in the air. The fires in two buses, reported by the emergency service, are the physical trace of that.
What changed on Thursday, beyond the death toll, is the transport decision. Stopping buses in both Kramatorsk and Sloviansk takes ordinary movement off the streets that the bomb hit. It also cuts the daily link between the two cities for people who do not have a car. Filashkin framed the halt as a refusal to keep putting drivers and passengers on routes that had just been struck.
The numbers to hold are the ones officials updated in public: 33 dead and 18 wounded on the Kramatorsk buses, three dead in Bilenke, a UMPB D-30 SN reported at about 10:00, and a same-day order to suspend public transport in Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. The open question is how long that suspension lasts, and whether the next count from the prosecutor's office moves the bus toll again.
