Passengers heading north from the Black Sea resort of Anapa to Moscow had a rough wake-up call on Monday. Their train was standing at Somovo station on the left bank of Voronezh when pieces of a drone that had been shot down landed on one of the carriages. Russian Railways said five travellers were hurt. A health ministry aide later put the number in hospital at four, with one patient fighting for his life.
Across the city and region, governor Alexander Gusev reported two men killed, born in 1960 and 1973, and 17 people injured, a child among them. His air defences, he said, had brought down 113 drones overnight, about 70 of them above Voronezh itself, a city of over a million roughly 500 km south of the capital. Flames broke out at factories, a downtown office block, an apartment building and two clusters of summer cottages, and windows were blown out in almost every district. Parts of the local state university switched to remote teaching.
Damage to the overhead power line stopped rail traffic on the southbound route for a while and left 18 passenger trains running late. Russia’s Investigative Committee has classified the strike as terrorism.
Ukraine had its own night of sirens. Kyiv’s air force counted 140 Russian drones plus four missiles overnight and said the bulk were intercepted. People were wounded in Zaporizhzhia, the Chernihiv region and Izium, and power had to be rationed in the Khmelnytskyi region after an energy site was hit.
The exchange comes just as diplomacy is stirring again. Moscow has agreed to rejoin three-way talks with Kyiv and Washington in Abu Dhabi next month, and Volodymyr Zelensky has confirmed he will take part. He set one condition on the agenda: questions of territory belong to the presidents themselves, while “other issues” can be left to technical teams. Neither capital said whether the latest strikes would change the timetable.
