(Reuters) – A Russian drone hit a bus carrying workers in the Ukrainian city of Marhanets early on Wednesday, killing nine people in a wave of attacks that targeted civilian infrastructure in east, south and central Ukraine, officials said.
The full scale of the attacks, which kept Kyiv and the eastern half of Ukraine awake for several hours overnight, was not immediately known.
The strikes came as both Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy have signalled that they would be willing to negotiate a pact that would ban striking civilian infrastructure.
If bilateral talks occur, it would be the first time the two sides had held direct negotiations since the early days of the war, which Russia began with a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
European and U.S. officials will meet with a Ukrainian delegation on Wednesday in London for further peace talks, following their Paris meeting last week. At the meeting, Washington is expecting Ukraine’s answer to a peace framework that requires Kyiv to accept Russian occupation, Axios reported.
“The Russians attacked a bus with employees of the enterprise who were on their way to work in Marhanets,” Mykola Lukashuk, head of the Dnipropetrovsk region council, said on Telegram.
Serhiy Lysak, governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region, which includes Marhanets, in central-southern Ukraine, said nine people were killed in the attack, with at least 30 injured.
Ukraine’s emergency service said that there was also an attack on the Synelnykivskyi district in the Dnipropetrovsk region that injured two people and sparked a fire at an agricultural enterprise.
Russia also launched “a massive” drone attack on the central Ukrainian region of Poltava, injuring at least six people, the emergency service said in a post on Telegram messaging app.
“Solely the city’s civilian infrastructure was under enemy attacks,” the emergency service said on Telegram.
Several fires broke out and residential buildings, enterprises, warehouses, and garages were damaged, the emergency service said, posting photos of firefighters battling flames at night.
Two people were injured in a drone attack on civilian infrastructure in the suburbs of the Black Sea port city of Odesa, which also sparked several fires, Oleh Kiper, governor of the southern Ukraine Odesa region, said on Telegram.
Large-scale fires also broke out as a result of a Russian drone attack on Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, Mayor Ihor Terekhov said on Telegram.
Air defence units were also engaged in repelling attacks on the Kyiv region, but there were no reports of potential damages.
There was no immediate comment from Russia about the attacks.
The Russian defence ministry said that its air defence units destroyed 11 Ukrainian drones overnight over several Russian regions and over the Crimean Peninsula. Regional governors said there were no reports of immediate damages. (This story has been refiled to add a dropped word in paragraph 1)
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne and Anna Pruchnicka in Gdansk; Writing by Lidia Kelly; Editing by Chris Reese and Gerry Doyle)
