Russian drone attack on bus in Ukraine kills at least 12

A Russian drone strike tore through the quiet of Ukraine’s southeastern Dnipropetrovsk region on Sunday, killing at least 12 miners as they travelled home from work, in what Ukrainian officials described as a deliberate assault on civilians employed in the country’s energy sector, the Al Jazeera reported.

The drone slammed into a bus carrying mine workers near the city of Ternivka, leaving behind a charred shell with shattered windows, its twisted frame resting off the roadside. Seven others were wounded in the attack, authorities said.

“Today, the enemy carried out a cynical and targeted attack on energy sector workers in the Dnipro region,” energy minister Denys Shmyhal said in a message posted on Telegram, calling the strike an act of terror. The victims, Ukraine’s largest private energy company DTEK later confirmed, were its employees returning from their shift underground.

Images released by the State Emergencies Service showed the scorched remains of the bus, a stark symbol of yet another day in which war followed civilians far from the front lines.

Elsewhere, Russian strikes earlier on Sunday wounded at least nine people after hitting a maternity hospital and a residential building in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia, deepening fears for the safety of civilians as winter tightens its grip.

The latest violence comes just days after US President Donald Trump said Russian President Vladimir Putin had agreed to temporarily halt attacks on Kyiv and other cities, as freezing temperatures plunged much of Ukraine into hardship. The Kremlin later confirmed a brief suspension of strikes on the capital until Sunday, though it offered few details beyond that narrow window.

Behind the battlefield rhetoric, diplomacy continues in parallel. Russia and Ukraine held trilateral talks with the United States in Abu Dhabi last month and are expected to return to the negotiating table later this month, as Washington intensifies efforts to broker an end to the nearly four-year-long war.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Sunday that the second round of talks would take place in the UAE capital on Wednesday and Thursday, even as deep divisions persist. While both sides have signalled conditional openness to compromise, Moscow and Kyiv remain far apart on core questions — chief among them whether Russia will retain control of occupied Ukrainian territory, particularly the industrial Donbas, or be forced to withdraw from lands seized since the invasion began.

For now, amid stalled diplomacy and broken promises, the war continues to exact its toll — this time on miners whose shift ended not in rest, but in tragedy.