A Russian drone attack killed at least nine people on Saturday after hitting a shuttle bus carrying civilians in the Sumy region in northeastern Ukraine, according to local residents and Ukrainian authorities.
The deadly strike came only hours after Ukrainian and Russian officials sat down face to face for the first time in more than three years in Istanbul.
At the brief meeting, the two sides agreed to exchange 1,000 prisoners each soon. But the talks and the frenetic swirl of diplomatic activity leading up to them did nothing to bring the two sides closer to negotiating an end to the war and easing the daily carnage, with soldiers on both sides being killed and injured on the front every day, and the civilian toll steadily rising.
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, called the attack on Saturday “a deliberate and barbaric war crime.”
“Instead of putting an end to the killing already now, as the US, Europe, Ukraine, and others propose, Putin continues to wage a war against civilians,” he said in a statement, referring to Russia’s leader, Vladimir V. Putin. “Pressure on Moscow must be increased to put an end to Russian terror.
The Russian military did not have any immediate comment.
The bus was struck by a Russian Lancet drone just outside of Bilopillia, which sits a few miles from the Russian border and had a prewar population of roughly 15,000 people.
While it has been subject to relentless bombardments for months, those attacks have increased in recent days, local residents said.
The Russians are dropping aerial bombs that can weigh thousands of pounds on the town night and day, a local resident, Yevgen, said when reached by phone. He asked that his family name not be used out of concern for their safety.
“The town is being completely destroyed,” he said. “You can’t drive by car there anymore — everything is tracked by drones, and they strike at anything that moves.”
He has evacuated his children to Sumy, a larger city which more than 250,000 people still call home.
But even Sumy, he said, is not safe.
The drone that struck the civilian bus at 6:17 a.m. is known as a Lancet, and is a precision weapon that Russia has used to devastating effect throughout the war, Ukrainian officials said. They added that it was guided to its target by another surveillance drone, which is now standard practice.
The Russians tried and failed to seize the city of Sumy in the early months of the war, before being driven back across the border.
Ukraine launched a cross-border offensive into the neighboring Kursk region last summer, seizing hundreds of square miles of Russian territory and hoping to create a buffer zone that would protect the city of Sumy from renewed assault.
But by March the Russians had largely driven the Ukrainian from Kursk and stepped up their bombardments aimed at Sumy and the surrounding region.
Marc Santora has been reporting from Ukraine since the beginning of the war with Russia. He was previously based in London as an international news editor focused on breaking news events and earlier the bureau chief for East and Central Europe, based in Warsaw. He has also reported extensively from Iraq and Africa.
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