At least five people were killed after a Russian drone struck a passenger train in the Kharkiv region overnight on Tuesday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the attack an “act of terrorism,” and posted a short video on X depicting one of the train carriages on fire. Regional emergency services have since said the fire has been extinguished.
“There is, and can be, no military justification for killing civilians in a train carriage,” Zelenskyy wrote on X, “In particular, over 200 people were on the train, and 18 were in the carriage hit by one of the Russian drones”.
“The Russians have significantly increased their capacity to kill, their capacity to terrorise,” he added, reiterating the need to assert more pressure on Moscow, a message Zelenskyy has repeatedly delivered to its allies.
A barrage of over 50 Russian drones also struck the Black Sea port city of Odesa, officials said on Tuesday, killing three people and wounding more than 30 others, including two children.
The drones targeted the city’s power grid, which Moscow has repeatedly attacked in an effort to cut power and heating in the height of winter, as well as five apartment buildings.
Odesa is a strategic hub for Ukrainian exports, and has been frequently targeted by Moscow. According to Ukrainian authorities, the drones used to attack the southern Ukrainian city included models that were recently upgraded by Russia to improve their range and strike power.
Russia also targeted Kyiv, which has increasingly come under fire in recent months, killing at least two people.
“In Bilogorodska community, two of our compatriots, man and a woman, died as a result of the attack,” the head of Kyiv region’s military administration, Mykola Kalashnyk, said in a post on Telegram. According to Ukraine’s national police, the couple’s four-year-old child survived but had been wounded in the attack. Three others were also injured.
Additional sources • AP, AFP