A Russian drone strike on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro hit a bus carrying mineworkers and killed 15 people, Ukrainian emergency services said on Sunday.
The news came hours after president Volodymyr Zelenskiy announced that the next round of peace talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegations would take place on Wednesday and Thursday.
The strike injured a further seven people, the emergency services said.
DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, said it owned the bus and accused Russia of carrying out “a large-scale terrorist attack on DTEK mines in the Dnipropetrovsk region”, whose capital is Dnipro.
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The strike came days after US president Donald Trump said the Kremlin had agreed to temporarily halt the targeting of the Ukrainian capital and other cities, as the region suffers under freezing temperatures that have brought widespread hardship to Ukrainians.
Speaking on Sunday, the Ukrainian energy minister Denys Shmyhal called the strike in Dnipro “a cynical and targeted attack on energy sector workers”, and said it had occurred near the Ternivska mine east of the city.
Hours earlier, Ukraine’s emergency services reported that Russian attack drones had injured six people at a maternity hospital in Zaporizhzhia, southern Ukraine, on Sunday morning.
Meanwhile, envoys from Russia, Ukraine and the US had been expected to meet on Sunday in Abu Dhabi to continue negotiations aimed at ending Moscow’s invasion of its neighbour. But on Sunday morning, Zelenskiy announced they would take place next week instead.
“Ukraine is ready for substantive talks, and we are interested in an outcome that will bring us closer to a real and dignified end to the war,” Zelensky said in a Telegram post.
There was no immediate comment from US or Russian officials.
On Saturday afternoon top Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev said he had held a “constructive meeting with the US peacemaking delegation” in Florida.
Officials have revealed few details of the talks in Abu Dhabi, which are part of a year-long effort by the Trump administration to steer the sides towards a peace deal and end almost four years of all-out war.
While Ukrainian and Russian officials have agreed in principle with Washington’s calls for a compromise, Moscow and Kyiv differ deeply over what an agreement should look like.
A central issue is whether Russia should keep or withdraw from areas of Ukraine its forces have occupied, especially Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland called the Donbas, and whether it should get land there that it has not yet captured.
Earlier on Sunday Russian attack drones struck a maternity hospital in southern Ukraine, the Ukrainian emergency services reported.
In a Telegram post, it said the strike wounded three women in the hospital in the city of Zaporizhzhia, and also sparked a fire in the gynaecology reception area that was later extinguished. Regional administration head Ivan Fedorov later said the number of injured had risen to six.
The Kremlin confirmed on Friday that it had agreed to hold off striking Kyiv until Sunday, but refused to reveal any details, making it difficult for an independent assessment of whether the conciliatory step had taken place.
In the past week, Russia has struck energy assets in the southern Ukrainian city of Odesa and in Kharkiv in the northeast. It also hit the Kyiv region on Wednesday, killing two people and injuring four.
Overnight into Sunday, Russia launched 90 attack drones, with 14 striking nine locations, Ukraine’s air force said in a Telegram post. A woman and a man were killed in an overnight drone strike in Dnipro, according to local administration head Oleksandr Hanzha.
Russian shelling also hit central Kherson, a city in southern Ukraine, soon after 7am, seriously wounding a 59-year-old woman, according to a Facebook post by the municipal military administration.
Russia’s defence ministry said on Sunday morning that its forces had used operational-tactical aviation, attack drones, missile forces and artillery to strike transport infrastructure used by Ukrainian forces.
In a separate post on Sunday, it said Russian air defences had shot down 21 Ukrainian drones flying over southwestern and western Russia. It did not mention any casualties or damage.
