A Russian drone strike on Dnipro hit a bus carrying mineworkers and killed at least a dozen people, authorities said on Sunday, hours after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy announced that the next round of peace talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegations would take place tomorrow and on Thursday.
The strike injured several more people and sparked a fire that was subsequently put out, emergency services said.
DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, said it owned the bus and accused Russia of carrying out “a large-scale terrorist attack on DTEK mines in the Dnipropetrovsk region,” whose capital is Dnipro.
Photo: State Emergency Service of Ukraine / EPA
“The epicenter of one of the attacks was a company bus transporting miners from the enterprise after a shift in the Dnipropetrovsk region,” the company said on social media.
The strike came days after US President Donald Trump said that the Kremlin had agreed to temporarily halt the targeting of the Ukrainian capital and other cities, as the region suffers under freezing temperatures that have brought widespread hardship.
Ukrainian Minister of Energy Denys Shmyhal on Sunday called the strike in Dnipro “a cynical and targeted attack on energy sector workers,” and said it occurred near the Ternivska mine east of the city.
Hours earlier, Ukraine’s emergency services reported that Russian attack drones injured six people at a maternity hospital in Zaporizhzhia, southern Ukraine, on Sunday morning.
Meanwhile, envoys from Russia, Ukraine and the US had been expected to meet on Sunday in Abu Dhabi to continue negotiations aimed at ending Moscow’s all-out invasion of its neighbor, but on Sunday morning, Zelenskiy announced that they would take place later this week instead.
“We have just had a report from our negotiating team. The dates for the next trilateral meetings have been set: Feb. 4 and 5 in Abu Dhabi. Ukraine is ready for substantive talks, and we are interested in an outcome that will bring us closer to a real and dignified end to the war,” Zelenskiy said on social media.
There was no immediate comment from US or Russian officials.
On Saturday afternoon, top Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev said that he had held a “constructive meeting with the US peacemaking delegation” in Florida.
Officials have so far revealed few details of the talks in Abu Dhabi, which are part of a year-long effort by the Trump administration to steer the sides toward a peace deal and end almost four years of war.
While Ukrainian and Russian officials have agreed in principle with Washington’s calls for a compromise, Moscow and Kyiv differ deeply over what an agreement should look like.
A central issue is whether Russia should keep or withdraw from areas of Ukraine its forces have occupied, especially Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland the Donbas, and whether it should get land there that it has not yet captured.
Earlier on Sunday, Russian attack drones struck a maternity hospital in southern Ukraine, the emergency service reported.
It said the strike wounded three women in the hospital in Zaporizhzhia, and also sparked a fire in the gynecology reception area that was later extinguished. Regional administration head Ivan Fedorov later said the number of injured had risen to six.
The Russian Ministry of Defense on Sunday said that air defenses shot down 21 Ukrainian drones flying over southwestern and western Russia.
It did not mention any casualties or damage.
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