Aid Site Strike Kills 29 in Ukraine
Overnight missile and drone barrages also hit power plants and hospitals across the country.
By Alessia Desai ·
Rescuers pulled bodies wrapped in white plastic sheeting from the cratered remains of an aid facility in Komyushuvakha, a village in the Zaporizhzhia region. The site, where residents had gathered to receive humanitarian supplies, was destroyed on Monday. By Tuesday, the death toll stood at 29, with 48 people still missing under the rubble.
Three days of mourning were declared in the region after Russian forces used bunker-busting bombs filled with nearly 1.5 tons of explosives in the attack. Mykhailo Semikin, acting head of the region's military administration, identified four police officers and two rescue workers among the dead. He described the event as one of the worst tragedies in the region since the start of the full-scale war, noting that the scale of the loss was terrifying.
The strike occurred amid a wave of overnight attacks that targeted infrastructure across nine regions. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reported that Russia launched 289 attack drones, 17 ballistic missiles, and 59 cruise missiles. The barrage triggered emergency power cuts and coincided with U.S. elections. Zelenskyy said Russia believed the United States would not notice the signal, but argued that Ukraine needed help defending its skies to stop the terror.
In the Kharkiv region to the northeast, a combined missile and drone attack wounded at least 62 people. Local authorities reported that a medical facility in the Nemyshlianskyi district was damaged, shattering windows in four apartment buildings and damaging cars. Oleh Syniehubov, head of the regional military administration, said more than 200 patients were transferred to other medical facilities.
Rescuers in the Dnipro area pulled a woman alive from the rubble on Tuesday morning. A Russian attack in that region killed one person and wounded 17 others. Oleksandr Hanzha, head of the regional military administration, stated that an outpatient clinic and a hospital were damaged, prompting the transfer of patients to other hospitals.
Russia's Ministry of Defense said it shot down 856 Ukrainian drones overnight. Sergei Sobyanin, the Moscow mayor, said 493 drones were fired toward the Russian capital. A Ukrainian drone attack wounded two employees at an oil refinery in Yaroslavl, regional Governor Mikhail Yevrayev said. He added that the refinery's infrastructure sustained damage. Rolling blackouts were instituted in the south, west, and east of Russian-occupied Crimea after attacks on energy infrastructure.
Local authorities in Zaporizhzhia continued searching the blast site on Tuesday for survivors. The search focused on areas where the aid facility had collapsed. Officials confirmed that at least five people were hurt in the initial explosion, while the number of missing residents remained unchanged as of the latest update.
