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A Russian drone attack on a bus carrying mine workers in Ukraine’s central-eastern Dnipropetrovsk region has killed at least 12 people, officials said.
The bus was driving about 40 miles (65km) from the frontline, according to police. Images published by Ukraine’s state emergency service showed what appeared to be an empty bus, its side windows shattered and windscreen hanging from the front.
DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, said those killed were travelling from one of its mining facilities after they had finished their shift.
“The enemy drone hit near a company shuttle bus in the Pavlograd district. Preliminarily, 12 people were killed and seven more were wounded,” the head of the regional military administration, Oleksandr Ganzha, said on Telegram.
An earlier drone attack in the region overnight killed a man and a woman in the central city of Dnipro, Ganzha said in an earlier post. A drone also struck a maternity hospital in the southern Zaporizhzhia region on Sunday, wounding at least seven people including two women receiving a medical examination.
The attacks came the same day a unilateral reduction in Russian strikes on Ukraine announced by the US president, Donald Trump, was due to end. Trump said on Thursday that Vladimir Putin had agreed to stop strikes on Kyiv and “various towns” during cold weather.
The terms of his agreement with the Russia president were not clear, however, and the Kremlin did not link the alleged truce to the weather.
A second round of talks between Russian, Ukrainian and US officials on a US-drafted plan to end the nearly four-year Ukraine war will begin on Wednesday, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said on Sunday.
One of Putin’s top envoys, Kirill Dmitriev, on Saturday held surprise talks with US officials in Florida without Ukraine. Among those US officials were Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and White House senior adviser Josh Gruenbaum.
Neither the Kremlin nor the US have confirmed the new dates for talks, which Zelenskyy said would be 4 and 5 February in Abu Dhabi.
The US says it is close to brokering a deal to end the conflict – Europe’s deadliest since the second world war – but neither Moscow nor Kyiv have been able to find a compromise on the key issue of territory.
Russia, which occupies about 20% of its neighbour, is pushing for full control of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region as part of any deal. It has threatened to take it by force if talks fail.
Ukraine has warned ceding ground will embolden Moscow and that it will not sign a deal that fails to deter Russia from invading again. Many Ukrainians find the idea of surrendering territory their soldiers have defended for years unconscionable.
The first round of talks on the US plan, held in Abu Dhabi last Friday and Saturday, failed to yield a breakthrough.
