A Russian drone struck emergency crews carrying out rescue operations in southern Ukraine on Sunday, hitting a former school and a nearby shelter that had already been destroyed by several Russian guided bombs as residents gathered to receive humanitarian aid, authorities said.
Ukraine said on Monday that at least 55 people were killed in the village of Komyshuvakha, near the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region.
No one was wounded in Sunday’s strike at the site, but critical rescue equipment was damaged, according to Ukraine’s State Emergency Service.
About 50 people remained missing, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, HUR, said. Many of the bodies recovered so far have yet to be identified, with DNA testing still underway.
Mykola Krasnov, a 72-year-old village resident, told The Associated Press on Saturday that he was still searching for his wife and had received no information from rescuers.
“She went to get humanitarian aid, and a 3-ton bomb was dropped there. Where is she?” he said. “She didn’t come home, and they didn’t find her body there. She isn’t in the morgue, and she isn’t here alive.”
HUR said Saturday that it had identified several Russian service members allegedly involved in the “double tap” attack, in which aerial bombs destroyed the former school and an underground shelter used by local residents.
Ukraine has repeatedly accused Russia of carrying out follow-up strikes on the same locations moments after an initial attack, in an effort to hit emergency personnel responding to the damage.
Community mourns police officers and local residents
On Saturday, police officers and relatives gathered in Zaporizhzhia to honor six officers killed in Russian attacks on Komyshuvakha. Four of them died near the former school.
Rain fell as grieving families stood beside the coffins, while fellow officers held portraits of the colleagues they had lost.
“They used every skill at their disposal to protect themselves. But when the enemy deliberately gathered civilians in one place and then launched strikes against them, no skills could have helped,” said Andrii Khomenko, a police lieutenant colonel who had served alongside the victims.
Yuliia Nykonenko, a senior police lieutenant, said the officers had repeatedly put their lives at risk to save others, including children. She recalled that they had once escaped a Russian FPV drone together.
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The community also buried three local residents who died in the attack. They were laid to rest near one another in a section of the Zaporizhzhia cemetery where officials plan to establish a memorial.
Among those mourning was Yurii Karapetian, a community leader whose wife, Natalia, was killed. He said she had been handing out bread to people sheltering underground when the Russian bombs struck.
“This pain, I would say, is unbearable,” he said.
Karapetian said his wife had chosen to remain in Komyshuvakha to support fellow residents, many of them elderly people living alone. He also appealed to the international community to intervene.
“The whole world must understand that if (the Russians) are not stopped, they will not stop. They will not stop at Ukraine. They will not stop anywhere,” he said.
Zelensky urges sanctions against Russian missile suppliers
President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday described the strike on emergency workers in Komyshuvakha as an act of “absolute cynicism and brutality.”
In a post on X, Zelensky said overnight Russian attacks on energy facilities in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region had cut power to more than 600,000 people. Other parts of the country also reported outages.
Russia fired 115 missiles, dropped 1,900 guided aerial bombs and launched more than 3,000 drones at Ukraine over the past week, Zelensky said. He added that many of the missiles were manufactured this year and urged Kyiv’s allies to sanction companies and other entities involved in their production.
“If the world does not have enough anti-ballistic capabilities to protect Ukrainian skies, then the missiles must be stopped on the production lines,” he said, calling on the European Union to adopt a forceful 22nd package of sanctions against Russia.
Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant cut off from external power
The Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, Europe’s largest nuclear facility, lost its external power connection on Sunday after a damaged transmission line was disconnected as a safety measure, the plant’s management said.
The facility was operating on backup diesel generators after an automatic protection system shut down the damaged Ferosplavna line, officials said.
The plant has remained offline since Russian forces seized it early in the war, but it still requires electricity to operate essential cooling systems. Its external power connections have been severed repeatedly, fueling concerns about a potential nuclear accident during a prolonged outage. Moscow and Kyiv have traded blame for strikes that damaged power lines near the facility.
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