The death toll from a Russian bombing of an aid distribution point in Ukraine’s southeastern Zaporizhzhia region on Monday has risen to 40, with dozens still missing, officials said, in one of the deadliest strikes on civilians this year.
The attack came a day after a brief US-brokered local ceasefire expired and less than a week before the United States is due to bring together Ukrainian and Russian delegations in Abu Dhabi for talks on ending the war, now in its fifth year.
Excavators were digging up earth near a huge blast crater while rescue workers searched underground for bodies.
Ivan Fedorov, the co-head of the Zaporizhzhia Regional Defense Council, wrote on Telegram that 59 people were missing.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said Russian forces first dropped aerial bombs on an underground school building being used as a distribution point as people arrived to collect aid, then struck the shelter with more bombs.
Classes have long since been suspended at the school because of its proximity to the front — Komyshuvakha lies some 17 km (11 miles) from the nearest Russian positions — but it served as a shelter and handed out humanitarian aid every Monday, Zelenskiy said.
The World Central Kitchen (WCK) charity, which delivers food and water to the community, said the facility that was hit was a humanitarian and administrative centre for locals.
“This strike hit a place where a community was organizing help for its own residents,” said Yuliya Stefanyuk, WCK response director for Ukraine.
Two members of a rescue crew and four police officers were among the dead, emergency services said.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said the attack targeted Ukrainian military units around Komyshuvakha and two other settlements, and that up to 25 Ukrainian servicemen were killed.
Russia and Ukraine both deny deliberately targeting civilians.
DRAMATIC FOOTAGE
Bodycam footage from one of the policemen killed in the attack, which Ukrainian police posted and Reuters verified, shows rubble and badly damaged buildings in the aftermath of the initial aerial attacks.
The policeman says in the clip that the area is under threat from drones and appears to take shelter briefly inside the shell of a bombed-out building.
Later in the footage, 15 to 20 people in civilian clothing are gathered outside the entrance to an underground shelter when a warning comes over a radio that Russian glide bombs are heading in the direction of the village.
Residents rush down several flights of stairs and towards a room, while the policeman with the bodycam turns through a door into what appears to be a temporary police station.
Three other men and a woman are visible in the final frames before there is a large explosion and the camera turns black.
In a social media post accompanying the footage, the national police said several strikes hit the area, including from a 3-ton FAB bomb, which is a large bomb fitted with a glide kit that allows it to fly long distances after being dropped from a Russian warplane.
According to defence intelligence websites, a 3-ton glide bomb would carry around 1.4 tons of explosives.
The strike occurred a day after a six-day ceasefire to evacuate civilians from the Russian-occupied southern Ukrainian town of Oleshky expired.
