Five killed in Russian drone strike on passenger train in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region

A Russian drone strike on a passenger train in Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv region killed five people and injured two others on Tuesday evening, while overnight attacks elsewhere in the country killed a further three people, the Ukrainian authorities said on Wednesday.

According to the Kharkiv region Prosecutor’s Office, the Russian military targeted a train travelling from the city of Chop on Ukraine’s western border to the Kharkiv region city of Barvinkove in eastern Ukraine.

The attack occurred near the village of Yazykove, just a few kilometres from Barvinkove, with one drone directly striking a carriage and two more exploding near the train, the Prosecutor’s Office said.

In a social media post following the attack, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that, “in any country, a drone strike on a civilian train would be regarded in the same way — purely as an act of terrorism” and stressed there could be “no military justification for killing civilians in a train carriage”.

Over 200 people were travelling on the train, including 18 in the carriage struck by the drone, Zelensky added.

“Russia must be held accountable for what it is doing,” Zelensky said. “And this means responsibility not only for strikes against our people, against our life, but for the very ability to carry out such attacks.”

Ukrainian Railways head Oleksandr Pertsovskyi thanked those who helped the train’s crew and passengers who helped evacuate the wounded, and pledged that railway services would continue even as it became “more difficult to keep operating each day”.

“We are regrouping, and there will be additional strict security restrictions in some places, but even on the most difficult days, we cannot give up,” Pertsovskyi wrote on Facebook.

In the town of Bilohorodka near Kyiv, a Russian drone struck a seven-storey apartment block, sparking a fire that killed two people and injured four more, the State Emergency Service of Ukraine said on Wednesday morning.

In the central Dnipropetrovsk region, Governor Oleksandr Hanzha said Russian drones had struck the town of Vasylkivka and the village of Mezhova overnight, killing one person and injuring five more, while a missile strike on Zelensky’s hometown Kryvyi Rih wounded another two people.

Ukraine’s Air Force said the Russian military had launched one ballistic missile and 146 attack drones at the country overnight, with air defences able to intercept 103 of the drones, while the missile and the other drones struck in 22 locations.