At least 33 people were killed when a Russian bomb struck two buses in the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk on Thursday, local officials said, as Moscow’s intensifying attacks grow ever more deadly.
The BBC reported that rescue officials put the toll at 33 killed and 18 wounded, up from the 30 dead first announced by local authorities.
Vladimir Putin In March 2018 Creative Commons Image
Putin at SCO Conference Creative Commons Image
Gruesome photos released by the local prosecutor’s office showed the burning shell of a bus and debris scattered across the road beside it.
Donetsk regional governor Vadym Filashkin didn’t mince words.
He wrote on Telegram that the Russians see a bus full of passengers as an attractive target precisely because one strike can kill as many people as possible.
Filashkin also announced he was shutting down public transport in the city and neighboring Sloviansk in light of “the sharp deterioration of the security situation.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia had hit an ordinary public transport stop with an aerial bomb and promised the strike would not go unanswered.
Ukraine’s human rights commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, said Russia is systematically destroying Kramatorsk and terrorizing its civilians.
Moscow, as usual, has said nothing about this one. It continues to deny that it targets civilians at all, although it continues to blatantly target civilians and civilian infrastructure daily since the war began in 2022.
The Glide Bomb Is Cheap, Crude, And Deadly Enough
For those who may not know what it is, the glide bomb is arguably the least sophisticated weapon in Russia’s inventory. It’s also one of the most effective.
The Russians use a Soviet-era FAB-500 dumb bomb weighing about 1,100 pounds of steel and explosives, with a bolt-on UMPK kit featuring pop-out wings and tail control surfaces guided by inertial and Kometa satellite navigation.
However, “guided” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Al Jazeera correspondent Audrey MacAlpine pointed out that glide bombs lack the accuracy of a ballistic missile or an FPV drone, so there’s no way to know for certain whether the buses were the aim point or simply in the wrong place.
However, Kramatorsk City Council said no military targets were anywhere near that street.
And with Russia’s track record, they don’t get the benefit of the doubt here.
Russia can continue the lie that they aren’t targeting civilians.
When they lob a half-ton bomb into a city street at the start of the workday, a mass-casualty event is the predictable result.
Russia has been doing that anyway for four and a half years.
The BBC cited that in late August, as many as nine glide bombs were fired at Kramatorsk in just one single day.
Emptying Kramatorsk Is The Strategy
Kramatorsk and neighboring Sloviansk anchor what Ukrainians call the fortress belt, the backbone of the defenses in the Donetsk oblast that Kyiv still holds.
Putin wants all of the Donbas, and these two cities are a burr in his saddle.
For much of the war, Kramatorsk served as a logistics and supply hub for the Ukrainian military.
Now Russian forces have edged close to the city’s eastern edge after they took positions west of the Donbas Canal. The city is under fire almost daily.
This wasn’t even the first bus hit there this month.
On October 2, a Russian FPV drone struck a passenger bus in Kramatorsk.
Buses have become a recurring target nationwide.
Earlier this year, back in February, a Russian drone hit a shuttle carrying coal miners going home from a mine in Dnipropetrovsk, killing 15.
Filashkin has now ordered all public transport in Kramatorsk and Sloviansk to halt and is urging anyone still in the region to move to safer parts of Ukraine.
That has always been Moscow’s strategy, working exactly as designed.
Make daily life impossible, empty the cities by either killing the civilians or forcing them out, then walk into them.
Moscow’s Strikes Are Getting Bigger And Wider
The Kramatorsk attack didn’t happen in a vacuum.
One night before, a massive Russian attack saw 130 drones, 48 cruise missiles, and an unspecified number of ballistic missiles fired at Ukraine, according to Ukraine’s air force.
Zelenskyy said that 70 ballistic missiles were fired and called it one of the war’s biggest attacks. A cruise missile slammed into a five-story apartment building in Pryluky, east of Kyiv.
The BBC reports the death toll there was 22, including five children.
Three of them were just a year old.
Kyiv itself is getting hammered daily.
Mayor Vitali Klitschko said Thursday’s raids killed three people and wounded 14, and the city’s water authority warned that pressure was falling across the right bank because of power cuts.
The Washington Post reports that blackouts in the capital are worsening.
Russia’s defense ministry claimed its targets included sites where Fire Point builds Flamingo cruise missiles and long-range drones, weapons that Kyiv uses to hit back at Russia.
Ukraine is hitting back regardless.
A drone set fire to a Yandex data center in Russia’s Ryazan region on the same day as the Kramatorsk strike.
Earlier this week, drones hit two commercial vessels in Bulgarian waters, and one of them sank. Shipping in the Black Sea has been affected, and Russia is believed to have caused the ship to sink.
The civilian numbers back it up. According to the United Nations, more civilians had been killed in Ukraine by August of this year than in all of 2025.
Air Defenses Are In Short Supply
Ukraine is facing a critical and near-total depletion of key air defense interceptors, particularly Patriot PAC-3 missile batteries, leaving major cities like Kyiv and vital energy infrastructure heavily exposed to intensifying Russian ballistic and hypersonic missile barrages.
And no missile is available somewhere else for Kyiv.
Shooting down a glide bomb in flight is rare.
The real fix is killing the aircraft that drop them, which means long-range air defense pushed close to the front. That’s a risky proposition with scarce, expensive systems.
For civilians in Kramatorsk, warnings of incoming attacks remain one of their few defenses. That’s thin protection against a half-ton bomb.
Zelenskyy once again called on Ukraine’s partners for new defense packages, particularly air defense missiles. It isn’t a new plea. He’s been making it for more than four years.
And during that time, the West has been sending enough aid to keep Ukraine from losing, but never quite enough to make Russia stop killing civilians.
The people on those buses in Kramatorsk were going to work, to the market, to see family. Two buses were destroyed by one bomb. That’s Russia’s strategy, and it won’t change.
About the Author: Steve Balestrieri
Steve Balestrieri is a National Security Columnist. He served as a US Army Special Forces NCO and Warrant Officer. In addition to writing on defense, he covers the NFL for PatsFans.com and is a member of the Pro Football Writers of America (PFWA). His work was regularly featured in many military publications.
