Monday was the day residents of Komyshuvakha queued for help. The village school, empty of pupils because the front line is too close, had become the place where food parcels and other supplies were handed out every week. This Monday Russian aircraft dropped guided bombs on it, and then on the shelter where people ran for cover. Ukraine’s emergency service counted at least 26 dead and five wounded.
Four police officers died, as did two members of a rescue crew; the emergency service named the men as Oleksii Sushchevskyi and Denys Konovalenko, each 44 years old. Officials said the emergency crews had already reached the scene and taken cover when the second wave arrived. Volodymyr Zelensky said nine more bombs had been aimed at the shelter after the first strike and called the attack “exceptionally horrific”, insisting the Russian military must have known what the building was used for. Rescue footage showed the sports hall in ruins; a smaller annexe and an emergency vehicle were lost as well.
The timing has made the attack especially painful for Kyiv. A humanitarian pause of six days around the Russian-occupied town of Oleshky in neighbouring Kherson region, which Melania Trump had helped arrange, had run out late on Sunday without either side reporting breaches. Roughly 170 civilians were evacuated during the pause, the longest lull since the full-scale invasion began in 2022, and Ukrainian officials had hoped it might open the way to something bigger.
Instead, Ukraine’s General Staff now accuses Moscow of using the quiet days to rotate troops and improve its positions. For Zelensky, the bombing was proof that Moscow has no interest in calming the war down.
Komyshuvakha lies south-east of the regional capital and has been treated as a front-line settlement for about a year, with repeated glide-bomb attacks. Rescue teams were still searching the rubble late into the evening.
