Getty ImagesRussian strikes on Ukraine – including on an aid centre, a hospice and a hospital – have killed at least 38 civilians and injured scores of others across Ukraine over the last 24 hours.
At least 33 people are known to have died in a glide bomb attack in the southern Zaporizhzhia region on Monday night, and President Volodymyr Zelensky said the number of victims was set to rise as more than 50 people could be trapped under the rubble.
He called the strike in Komyshuvakha village “one of the largest mass killings committed by Russia during this war”.
Ukraine had proposed to extend and expand last week’s ceasefire in the Kherson region which allowed people from the frontline Russian-occupied town of Oleshky to evacuate, Zelensky added.
Elsewhere, a hospice was attacked in the central city of Dnipro and a hospital was hit in the north-eastern city of Kharkiv, where Zelensky said 73 people were wounded, most of them elderly patients.
Nine 3,000kg aerial bombs hit Komyshuvakha as residents were gathering to receive humanitarian aid at a distribution centre, authorities said. Local media reported that when the attack began, people took refuge underground but the roof collapsed, trapping many underneath.
“The scale of the tragedy is difficult to comprehend,” regional head Mykhailo Semikin said.
Russia’s defense ministry said the attack had targeted Ukrainian military units and killed 25 servicemen.
However, there was no credible evidence that the site was being used by the Ukrainian military and there were no major military or industrial facilities in the settlement of Komyshuvakha, reports BBC News Russian defence correspondent Ilya Abishev.
The village is to the south-east of the city of Zaporizhzhia, which has come under constant Russian bombardment.
According to Abishev, Komyshuvakha is of high military importance as part of Ukraine’s defensive and transport network on the approaches to the regional capital.
But the UN’s human rights monitoring mission said the distribution of humanitarian aid at the local school had been highly publicised and the attack “seems to have violated the most fundamental principles of international humanitarian law”.
Further north, in Dnipro, nearly 50 terminally ill patients were being transferred to other facilities after their hospice was destroyed by a Russian missile on Monday night. The oldest of the patients was 90 years old.
Mayor Boris Filatov posted photos on Telegram showing elderly people lying in their beds in a hospice room with blown-out windows and rubble and broken glass strewn on the floors.
Dnipropetrovsk authorities/Telegram“I realise that I am violating ethics,” wrote Filatov. “I want as many people as possible to see these photos. Especially politicians and diplomats. Especially abroad.
“These are elderly, terminally ill people. This is a Russian missile.”
Elsewhere in Dnipro, a separate strike killed two people and left 18 others wounded. Another five people were killed in aerial bomb and drone strikes on Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.
Russia has also struck energy infrastructure in nine regions, affecting water and heating.
The water supply in Kyiv was entirely cut off “due to enemy attacks and damage to the capital’s energy infrastructure”, the main water supplier Kyivvodokanal said. The entire metro network was suspended on Tuesday and Mayor Vitali Klitschko said the situation surrounding the city’s power supply was becoming “very difficult”.
As Ukraine was counting its dead, the Kremlin announced it would take part in three-way peace talks with Ukraine brokered by the US in Abu Dhabi on 10-11 November.
It will be the first trilateral meeting since February. Since then, Russia and the US have begun engaging more directly, with US President Donald Trump announcing a deal to import Russian diesel.
Speaking to reporters in Berlin on Tuesday, Zelensky said that it was important for Russia to engage seriously in negotiations on a ceasefire and a peaceful settlement, but that he had so far had not seen “any indication” of that being the case.
Several rounds of ceasefire talks late last year yielded no results, and in public declarations Russian officials have generally refused to budge from Moscow’s maximalist demand of effective Ukrainian surrender.
US First Lady Melania Trump Melania Trump, who was credited with brokering a truce last week in the besieged town of Oleshky, is set to host representatives of Russia and Ukraine at the White House on Thursday. However, no details were given in the White House statement of who was due to attend the meeting.
The UN said last month that civilian casualties in Ukraine had reached a “record level”, as Russian armed forces resumed systematic attacks on energy infrastructure.
Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Its advances on the front line have since stalled, and attacks on Ukraine have intensified, with Moscow employing large numbers of missiles and drones to strike Ukrainian cities.
At the same time, Ukraine is faces a critical air defense shortage due to stalled Western deliveries of weapons and a lack of American Patriot interceptor missiles.
In Berlin, Zelensky acknowledged that although the front line was stable “the situation in the air was not as positive, particularly when it comes to our air defence capabilities and the protection of our civilian population”.
