Photo: Brücke-Osteuropa / Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Russia struck the south-eastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia with five glide bombs on Saturday morning, October 10, killing at least 15 people, three of them children, Ukrainian officials said. At least 16 others were injured, and more people were believed to be trapped under collapsed buildings as search operations continued through the day.
Residential buildings hit
The bombs fell on residential buildings. Images from one of the sites showed an apartment block that had largely caved in. Acting Mayor Regina Kharchenko said the ground floor of the building had been hit and the storeys above it then came down. More than 80 rescue workers were at the scene, pausing regularly to listen for sounds from survivors beneath the debris.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry said two of the injured were in a critical condition. According to Reuters, rescuers pulled a young girl’s parents alive from the rubble, though the child herself was among the dead.
Kharchenko said Russia had struck at “our very heart”, and that “our littlest ones” were among the dead, calling their loss “awful grief for their families. For the city.”
Zelensky links strike to US diesel deal
President Volodymyr Zelensky said the attack was Russia expressing its “thanks” for a deal announced by US President Donald Trump on Friday night that eases sanctions so the United States can import Russian diesel. He said 13 other Ukrainian regions had also come under attack overnight, and argued that Moscow reads any easing of pressure as permission to keep fighting.
Zelensky has called the diesel arrangement a gift to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Analysts see it as an attempt by Trump to ease fuel-price worries at home ahead of the US midterm elections.
A deadly week for Ukrainian civilians
Zaporizhzhia, a regional centre of more than 7 lakh people, lies less than 16 km from the front line and is regularly targeted by Russian drones and missiles. Saturday’s strike capped a particularly deadly week: on Thursday, at least 33 people were killed when a glide bomb hit two civilian buses in Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region, and a day earlier a missile strike on an apartment block in Pryluky, east of Kyiv, killed 22 people, including five children.
The United Nations has said civilian casualties in Ukraine rose by 55% in the first eight months of this year. Both sides have stepped up strikes on infrastructure, with Russia hitting energy facilities as winter approaches and Ukraine targeting refineries and other economic assets inside Russia. Moscow denies targeting civilians.
What happens next
Officials have said more people may still be under the rubble, so the death toll could rise as crews keep working. The strike has also given fresh weight to Kyiv’s criticism of the US diesel deal, which Zelensky said sent Moscow the wrong signal and “needs to be corrected”.
