Glide bomb hits passenger buses, at least 30 killed in Kramatorsk; Russian strikes shift toward Ukraine's transport lifelines

According to Al Jazeera, a Russian glide bomb struck two passenger buses in the town of Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine on the morning of October 8, killing at least 30 and wounding 18. The town is about 20 kilometers from the front line. Ukrainian officials determined the strike was intentional: such bombs are dropped by aircraft on the Russian side and glide toward fixed coordinates on the ground.

"For the Russians, a passenger bus loaded with travelers is an ideal target, because a single strike can cause the maximum number of casualties," Vadym Filashkin, the governor of the region that includes Kramatorsk, wrote on Telegram. He also accused Russia of "deliberately disregarding every conceivable rule of war and norm of international humanitarian law" and of "specifically choosing locations that inflict the greatest suffering on civilians." Filashkin has ordered the suspension of all public transport operations in Kramatorsk and neighboring Sloviansk.

Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Kyiv-based think tank "Pentagon," told Al Jazeera that Russian tactics have shown a clear shift: "They previously focused on depriving Ukraine of electricity, cutting off power and heating; now their mission also includes paralyzing infrastructure and creating transport collapse." He noted that Russian strikes on railways and fuel stations "have achieved results to a certain extent," and that "they are forcing peace talks on their own terms while psychologically striking the public and fundamentally disrupting normal life."

United Nations data shows that, amid the continuing war, Russian denials of strikes against civilians carry no weight for Ukrainians — in the first eight months of 2026, a total of 15,280 Ukrainian civilians were killed or wounded, 55% higher than the same period in 2025. Since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukrainian airspace has had no civilian flights, and trains, buses and freight trucks have become the lifeline for civilian life, business operations and the transport of military and humanitarian supplies.

The railways have borne particularly heavy blows. According to Al Jazeera, citing end-of-September data from Ukrzaliznytsia, the Ukrainian national railway company, at least 521 locomotives have been hit by drones and artillery fire since 2022, with three-fifths of those incidents occurring in 2026. Some locomotives were hit while in motion, and drones have also struck passenger carriages, causing fires and casualties. The largest attack of the year occurred in January in the Kharkiv region, killing 5 passengers. Ukrainian President Zelensky called the act "terrorism" and said it "has no military justification whatsoever."

### New-generation drones and "signal relay"

Al Jazeera pointed out that the key to Russian forces' ability to keep hitting moving trains and buses is that the new generation of drones is no longer a slow-flying craft that can be jammed electronically or shot down with rifles. These jet-powered aircraft carry larger warheads, are manually controlled and are interconnected via wireless mesh networks, with each aircraft acting as a signal relay node.

"They are manually controlled. The Russians have improved communications," Andriy Pronin, one of Ukraine's drone warfare pioneers, told Al Jazeera. He said that some signals are relayed through modems on the ground, on rooftops and even inside residential apartments — and these modems are turned on by Ukrainians recruited by Russian intelligence agencies. According to Ukrainian intelligence agencies, prosecutors and officials, Russia recruited hundreds of people through Telegram with money as bait, including minors — many of whom did not understand the consequences of their actions and have since been arrested and convicted.

According to Al Jazeera, citing Ukrainian officials, the drones' video transmission and positioning data often rely on Ukrainian SIM cards smuggled into the country, or are transmitted via neighboring countries and the mobile phone networks of pro-Moscow Belarus — a judgment that is an inference by Ukrainian officials rather than a confirmed conclusion. The effect is that these drones can now reach virtually all of Ukraine, including the west that was once considered a safe zone. On September 14, just 30 minutes after a train carrying former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson crossed the border into Poland, a Russian drone struck the locomotive of another passenger train at the Yahodyn railway station in western Ukraine. According to Al Jazeera, former CIA director David Petraeus, who was aboard an adjacent train, described that strike as "terrible" and "the act of a truly barbaric leader."

### Civilian terror

Ukrainian civilians are likewise in a state of constant fear. Alyna, a 24-year-old resident of Kyiv, told Al Jazeera that during a daytime air raid on September 23, she realized her workplace was in one of the most vulnerable positions at Kyiv's central railway station — the middle of a massive overpass spanning the station's 14 main rail lines. Air raid sirens and the explosion sounds of jet-powered drones drove her down the stairs and into a metro station. A drone hit a nearby market, smoke rose, and a circular modernist building known as "Pak" was burned down. "Everything was whizzing and creaking over my head," Alyna said. For safety reasons, she withheld her surname in the interview.

The strikes extend well beyond the railways. According to Al Jazeera, Russian drones have expanded their targets to include fuel stations, buses and minibuses, as well as ports — in an effort to cripple Ukraine's exports of grain, vegetable oil and steel. In the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia, whose pre-war population was 720,000, university lecturer Tatyana Melikhova told Al Jazeera: "You walk up to a minibus and you can hear (the drone) buzzing beside it." Her 18-year-old student Tatyana Bubenets, along with two other civilians aged 31 and 48, were killed on July 6 when an AI drone with pre-programmed strike coordinates attacked a fuel station.

Al Jazeera's reporting places the above pattern under a single logic: beyond continuing strikes on the power system, Russia is expanding strikes to the transport lifelines that are harder to defend and have direct spillover effects on civilians' daily lives, pressuring Ukraine through infrastructure collapse and mass civilian casualties to accept Russian terms.