Russian drones struck two passenger trains in northern Ukraine on Saturday, killing at least one person and injuring dozens of others in the region of Sumy, Ukrainian officials said.
After the first train was struck, rescue crews raced to help the wounded and evacuate survivors from it. Then a second Russian drone slammed into another train nearby, witnesses and Ukrainian officials said.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said dozens of people had been injured and accused the Russians of once again deliberately attacking civilians. Russian officials have denied targeting civilians, but their forces have hit people in bread lines and on playgrounds, as well as apartment blocks, hospitals and other civilian centers throughout the war.
“This is terror the world must not ignore,” Mr. Zelensky said in a statement.
Parts of the Sumy region had already been without power for three days when the Russian drones struck on Saturday, Ihor Saldyga, a local journalist, said in a phone interview.
“First they hit power infrastructure, then they struck the railway station several times,” he said. “They were striking the locomotives with precision.”
The attack was the latest in a series of strikes aimed at railway infrastructure and part of a broader campaign Russia has been waging for more than three years to ravage the nation’s critical services.
It capped a violent week that started last Sunday, when some 600 drones and dozens of missiles were fired during a 12-hour bombardment of the Ukrainian capital and other cities across the country.
Less than five days later, the Russians launched their largest assault of the war aimed at Ukrainian gas facilities, with a bombardment that included nearly 400 drones and 35 cruise and ballistic missiles.
Much of the barrage was focused on gas facilities around the city of Poltava in eastern Ukraine, where explosions echoed from dusk on Thursday until dawn on Friday.
An industrial farm in the Kharkiv region was also struck by drones, triggering a fire that killed some 13,000 pigs, according to Ukraine’s State Emergency Service.
A day earlier, Russian forces targeted the power station that feeds the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, temporarily blacking out the massive containment center that was designed to prevent the release of radiological materiel following the meltdown in one of the reactors in 1986. The power was swiftly restored.
The attack on the power supply to Chernobyl came as a functional nuclear power plant, near the central Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, remains disconnected from the power grid. That has renewed alarm about the safety of the facility, which has been forced to rely solely on diesel generators for critical cooling systems that keep nuclear fuel from melting down in the switched-off reactors at the plant.
Russian troops occupied the plant in the first weeks of their full-scale invasion in early 2022, and it remains under their control.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia accused Ukraine of causing the outage there but offered no evidence to support the claim.
“This is a dangerous game, and people on the other side should also understand that if they’re going to play it so dangerously, they still have operating nuclear power plants on their side,” Mr. Putin said during a speech in Sochi, Russia, on Thursday. “And what’s stopping us from retaliating in kind? Let them think about that.”
Ukrainian officials have accused Russia of manufacturing the crisis in order to justify what they call a dangerous move of restarting the plant by connecting it to the Russian power grid.
The diesel generators powering the plant, which has been disconnected from the grid since Sept. 23, are designed only for short-term emergency use.
The head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency, Rafael Grossi, issued a statement on Friday pleading with both Russia and Ukraine to allow for repair work to restore power safely.
As the Russian military has stepped up its attacks on both civilian and military across Ukraine in recent weeks, Kyiv has vowed to respond by bombarding Russian oil and gas facilities that fund Moscow’s war effort.
Ukrainian drones struck one of the largest oil refineries in Russia before dawn on Saturday, according to Russian and Ukrainian authorities.
Mr. Zelensky has also promised to make the pain of war felt across Russia.
“Russia chooses war, Russia destroys our people’s lives, and must be held accountable,” he said.
Nataliia Novosolova contributed reporting.
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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