It was a devastating scene in a devastated city.
Under shredded netting meant to shield civilians from Russian drones, near residential buildings shattered by explosions, the charred metal skeleton of a commuter bus was all that was left on Thursday after another Russian strike in Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine.
At least 30 people were killed, local officials said, the latest civilian casualties in Moscow’s unrelenting campaign to make Ukraine’s towns and cities unlivable.
As rescue workers in Kramatorsk were tending to the injured and gathering body parts from the street, President Volodymyr Zelensky was making his way to another Ukrainian city, Pryluky, where he implored the world to do more to counter Russian aggression.
He stood near the rubble of an apartment building destroyed by a Russian missile on Wednesday, killing 22 people, including five children. Entire families died in that strike.
Speaking in Pryluky, which was hit despite being about 200 miles from any combat zone, Mr. Zelensky said that Russia was seeking ways to expand its advantage in the skies and unleash more terror.
He warned that China was developing technology meant to compete with the Starlink satellite network and planned to share it with Russia. He called on the United States to allow Ukraine to use Starlink to target Russian missile and drone launch sites inside Russia.
The price of inaction, Mr. Zelensky said, was scenes like those in Pryluky, where he met with rescue workers and grieving families.
The Russian military has attacked civilian homes throughout the war. But the death toll is rising as Moscow fields an ever-growing supply of powerful precision weapons, stretching Ukraine’s air defenses with daily onslaughts.
The Kremlin has expanded its arsenal of newly developed jet-powered drones and increased the range of powerful guided bombs dropped from warplanes. Russia is also employing new communication tools that allow pilots to remotely guide munitions for precision strikes from hundreds of miles away.
Russia launched about 3,500 jet-powered drones against targets across Ukraine in September, compared with 350 in June, according to the Ukrainian Air Force. Ukraine is working furiously to develop interceptors that work against the jet-powered drones, which travel hundreds of miles per hour.
On Thursday morning, one of those jet drones smashed into a store in downtown Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, killing three people and injuring 14 others, city officials said.
The store was hit a day after a large-scale bombardment on Wednesday killed at least 30 people across the country, including six in the capital.
Mr. Zelensky noted that the bombardment, which included the cruise missile strike on the apartment complex in Pryluky, coincided with President Vladimir V. Putin’s 74th birthday.
“This is the kind of ‘gift’ Putin gave himself for his birthday,” Mr. Zelensky said on Wednesday. “The killing of children, the killing of people.”
While drones and missiles pose the biggest threat across Ukraine, frontline cities like Kramatorsk, where the bus was struck, are being slowly destroyed by artillery and guided bombs that can pack hundreds of pounds of explosives.
In August, Russia dropped a record 8,700 guided bombs on military and civilian targets, according to the Ukrainian military. The only reliable defense against these bombs, which can hit targets more than 100 miles from where they are released, is to take out the warplanes that deliver them or destroy the warehouses where they are stored.
The epicenter of the fighting remains the eastern Donetsk region, where the majority of glide bomb strikes are recorded. Ukraine still controls around 20 percent of the territory, including Kramatorsk, Sloviansk and other cities that make up a belt of heavily fortified land.
Around 93,000 civilians remain in areas under Ukrainian control in Donetsk, including more than 4,200 children, according to local officials.
“The Russians are deliberately targeting civilians,” Vadym Filashkin, the head of the Donetsk regional military administration, said in a statement after the attack on the bus. “For them, a bus carrying passengers is an attractive target precisely because a single strike can kill as many people as possible.”
Nataliia Novosolova and Liubov Sholudko contributed reporting.
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