It was still morning when the first of five bombs released from Russian aircraft crashed into blocks of flats in Zaporizhzhia. By afternoon, regional officials counted at least 17 dead, three of them children, and 16 wounded, while six residents were still missing. The southeastern city will observe a day of mourning on Sunday.
Over 80 rescuers spent the day digging through concrete, pausing every so often in silence to listen for anyone calling from below. One woman was lifted out alive and taken to hospital. Speaking on Ukrainian television, acting mayor Regina Kharchenko described how a strike at street level brought the upper storeys down on top of it, and said the city’s “littlest ones” were among the victims. Home to roughly 700,000 people, Zaporizhzhia sits about 16 kilometres from the front and has seen attacks grow more frequent over recent months.
The timing turned the tragedy into a diplomatic argument. The day before, Donald Trump had signalled a softer line on Moscow’s fuel trade, saying he and Vladimir Putin agreed to let more Russian diesel flow onto world markets. Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Moscow had expressed “its thanks” with bombs, adding that the Kremlin reads every easing of pressure as permission to keep going. Berlin responded that it would keep its sanctions in place and work with EU partners on new ones.
Kyiv felt the night’s attacks too. Damage to an energy site outside the capital knocked out electricity across parts of the city, interrupted the water supply and briefly halted the metro. Kyiv’s military reckoned that roughly three in four of the 160 attack drones sent in during the night never reached their targets.
It capped a grim week. Other towns are still counting their own losses: Kramatorsk lost at least 33 residents when two buses came under fire on Thursday, and Pryluky lost 22 the day before. UN monitors say civilian deaths and injuries in the country were up by more than half between January and August. Talks between American, Ukrainian and European officials in Miami on Friday produced no breakthrough.
