Six Russian drones hit Kusum's Sumy plant, killing one engineer, with damage put above $50 million

Six Russian drones hit an operating pharmaceutical plant owned by Delhi-based Kusum Healthcare in Sumy on 4 October, killing one engineer and leaving others injured, co-founder Sanjeev Gupta told The Times of India. The company said damage is expected to exceed $50 million. The Kyiv Independent identified the dead employee as a 52-year-old man and put the number of injured at three.

Gupta said the engineering department took the strike and that one engineer was killed while other staff were evacuated. He called it a targeted attack. Kusum's statement described the strike as hostile and senseless, and said one employee was confirmed dead on site with several others gravely injured. The plant was running when the drones arrived.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, writing on 4 October, said Russian forces had attacked an ordinary pharmaceutical warehouse in Sumy with drones and that one person had been killed. He offered condolences to the family. In the same note he said a drone had again struck the Pivnichnyi Bridge in Kyiv that morning. He put the overnight wave at 135 drones, more than 50 of them jet-powered, with hits reported in Kyiv, Dnipro, Kharkiv, Donetsk, Sumy and Zaporizhzhia. Over that week, he said, Russia had used more than 1,900 drones, 1,700 aerial bombs and 25 missiles.

A second hit on the same Indian firm

This is the second Russian drone strike on Kusum's Ukrainian operations. On 14 April 2025 a drone destroyed a company warehouse. Kusum said losses from that earlier attack exceeded 1 billion hryvnia. The firm has asked, through pharmaceutical forums, that New Delhi raise the protection of its business in diplomatic contacts. It said it had received no public statement of regret or support from the Indian government after the latest strike.

The Ukrainian Embassy in India said the site was an Indian-owned pharmaceutical factory, not a military target, and that it made medicines the country urgently needs. The embassy offered condolences to the dead employee's family and sympathy to the Indian owners.

Kusum said the Sumy plant supplies essential medicines to Ukraine and a neighbouring CIS country, and that the strike had hurt staff and patients who depend on those supplies. India management is reviewing the damage and the effect on operations. The company said its Indian production continues at two units in Bhiwadi, Rajasthan, and a special economic zone unit at Pithampur, near Indore in Madhya Pradesh.

What the firm is

Kusum Healthcare was founded in 1997 and is headquartered in Delhi. It describes itself as a fully integrated pharmaceutical group covering India and export markets, with a separate Ukraine operation. The Sumy site was the group's manufacturing foothold inside the country at war. A $50 million loss on one plant, stacked on a warehouse loss already counted in the billions of hryvnia, is large for a mid-sized exporter. It also lands on a week when Chancellor Friedrich Merz was in Kyiv signing a $1.5 billion German package aimed in part at the energy system Russia has been hitting through the winter.

The company has framed the strike as an attack on a private healthcare business that produces medicines. It has accused Russia of using the wider conflict to hit that business. Moscow has not, in the accounts published so far, issued a specific claim that the Sumy plant was a military object. Ukrainian officials have treated it as a civilian pharmaceutical site.

For Indian firms with plant and inventory inside Ukraine, the practical question is now narrower than the war itself. Kusum's Indian lines can keep making product. The Ukraine line cannot, at least until the engineering block is rebuilt, and the firm says it does not know when that will be. Patients on the Ukrainian and CIS lists supplied from Sumy are the people who will notice first, before any insurance argument is settled.

The 4 October strike also sits inside a larger overnight pattern. Zelenskyy's count of 135 drones, more than a third of them jet-powered, matches the reason Merz gave in Kyiv for a joint line of anti-jet drones. A pharmaceutical plant in Sumy is not an energy substation and not a bridge. It is, on the company's account and the embassy's, a civilian factory that had already lost a warehouse to a drone 17 months earlier. The open question for Kusum is whether New Delhi will take that second loss into the talks External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar says India is now holding with both Kyiv and Moscow on shipping, grain and energy.