Drone hits rescue crews in Ukraine

Ukrainian authorities confirmed on Monday that at least 55 people died in the village of Komyshuvakha after a Russian drone struck emergency workers on Sunday. The attack occurred in the Zaporizhzhia region, near the front line. The drone hit a former school and a nearby shelter that had already been damaged by multiple guided bombs. Residents had gathered at the site to wait for humanitarian aid.

Ukraine’s State Emergency Service reported that no one was injured in the Sunday strike on the same location. However, specialized rescue equipment was damaged in the explosion. The military intelligence agency, HUR, stated that approximately 50 people were still missing as of Saturday. Many of the recovered bodies have not yet been identified. DNA analysis is currently underway to determine the identities of the victims.

Mykola Krasnov, a 72-year-old village resident, told The Associated Press on Saturday that he was still searching for his wife. He said he had heard no news from rescuers since the initial attack. “She went to get humanitarian aid, and a 3-ton bomb was dropped there. Where is she?” Krasnov 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 announced on Saturday that it had identified some of the Russian service members involved in the double tap strike. The initial aerial bombs destroyed the former school and an underground facility used by residents as shelter. Ukraine has routinely accused Russia of conducting multiple strikes at the same site in quick succession. The goal of these tactics is to target emergency crews responding to the first attack.

Police officers and relatives gathered in Zaporizhzhia on Saturday for a farewell ceremony. Six officers were killed in the Russian strikes on Komyshuvakha. Four of the officers died near the former school. Rain fell during the ceremony as families wept beside the coffins. Officers held portraits of their fallen colleagues. Andrii Khomenko, a police lieutenant colonel who worked alongside the victims, said the officers 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,” Khomenko said.

Yuliia Nykonenko, a senior police lieutenant, stated that the officers risked their lives to save others, including children. She noted that the group had once escaped a Russian FPV drone together. The community also buried three residents among the dead. They were interred near one another in a part of the Zaporizhzhia cemetery where authorities plan to create a memorial. Yurii Karapetian, a community leader, mourned his wife, Natalia Karapetian, who was killed. He said she was distributing bread to those in the shelter when the bombs struck. “This pain, I would say, is unbearable,” he said. Karapetian said his wife chose to stay in Komyshuvakha to help other residents, many of them elderly and living alone.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the attack on emergency crews in Komyshuvakha as absolute cynicism and brutality in a Sunday post on X. He said that overnight Russian strikes on energy infrastructure in Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk region had left more than 600,000 people without power. Other regions also faced outages. Zelenskyy stated that Russia launched 115 missiles, 1,900 guided aerial bombs and more than 3,000 drones against Ukraine in the past week. He added that many of the missiles had been produced this year. Zelenskyy called on Kyiv's partners to sanction 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. He urged the European Union to impose a strong 22nd package of sanctions against Russia.

The Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant lost its external power supply on Sunday. The plant’s management reported that a damaged power line was disconnected for safety. The plant is now powered by backup diesel generators after an automatic protection system shut down the damaged Ferosplavna line. The facility went offline soon after being captured by Russia early in the war. It needs power to keep essential cooling systems running. The external power supply has been periodically severed, raising fears of a nuclear accident in case of protracted outages. Moscow and Kyiv have blamed each other for strikes that damaged nearby power lines.