By Dan Peleschuk and Max Hunder
KYIV, Oct 29 (Reuters) – A Russian drone strike killed at least 14 people on a crowded rail platform in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro on Thursday and five in daytime strikes on other cities, officials said, even as a local truce in Kherson raised cautious hopes for a resumption of diplomacy.
Two teenagers were killed on a central street in Chernihiv in northern Ukraine and three people were killed in a strike on an apartment building in the central city of Kremenchuk.
“Russia is deliberately hunting civilians: on trains, at stations, in residential buildings,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Sergiy Koretskyi said on the Telegram app.
“There is no justification for this terror, and there never can be.”
Moscow had made clear that a six-day humanitarian truce brokered with US help applied only to south Ukraine’s Kherson region, to enable humanitarian relief to reach the Russian-held town of Oleshky, marooned in a war zone since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in early 2022.
RUSSIAN DRONES STRIKE ACROSS UKRAINE
Elsewhere, Russian drone and missile attacks on critical infrastructure including the rail network have been making civilian life increasingly fraught as well as burdening the economy. They have exploited an acute shortage of air defence missiles.
Like Kyiv, Moscow denies deliberately targeting civilians.
The state rail company Ukrzaliznytsia said a jet-powered drone had struck a platform at Dnipro’s main station where a commuter train was preparing to depart for the nearby city of Zaporizhzhia.
Images posted by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy showed bodies strewn across the ground as rescuers rushed the wounded away on stretchers.
In Chernihiv, in addition to the two dead, 23 people were wounded in a drone attack on a busy downtown street.
“Ordinary, peaceful people were attacked who were just going to work, going about their daily business, making plans for the day,” said Dmytro Bryzhynskyi, head of the city’s military administration.
In Kremenchuk, the strike on the housing block killed three people and wounded 15, the regional governor said.
Zelenskiy responded to the Dnipro strike by urging partners to put more pressure on Russia with a glancing reference to the US withdrawal of sanctions on Russian diesel exports and the EU’s suspension of measures against two Russian billionaires.
“Just how many terrorist strikes has Russia carried out against our people since sanctions were lifted on certain Russian oligarchs and the Russian energy sector, rather than de-escalating?” he wrote on X.
(Writing by Dan Peleschuk; Editing by Alison Williams and Kevin Liffey)
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