Armed Forces of Ukraine/Telegram
Twelve miners were killed by a Russian drone strike in eastern Ukraine, the country’s largest private energy company said.
DTEK said a bus carrying workers after a shift in the Dnipropetrovsk region was targeted in Sunday’s attack. At least 15 people were injured, state emergency services said.
Earlier, at least two other people were killed and nine injured in separate Russian attacks overnight and on Sunday.
Among the victims were six people injured when a drone hit a maternity hospital in Zaporizhzhia. Two of them were women who were giving birth at the time of the strike.
In an article on Telegram, Zaporizhzhia regional head Ivan Fedorov called this “further evidence of a war against life.”
BBC Verify confirmed that it was maternity ward number 3 on Bocharova Street in the east of the city.
Images shared on social media carried watermarks from state and local governments and showed offices, rooms with beds for patients and a children’s room with broken windows and covered in debris.
Some images showed the extent of the fire damage, while two videos showed a fire still burning on the first floor. Another shows firefighters breaking down interior doors and evacuating patients.
EPA
Reuters
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha said the hospital attack showed that Russian President Vladimir Putin was waging a “war against civilians contrary to peace efforts.”
Fedorov later reported that three people were injured in another strike in a residential area.
After the DTEK bus strike in the town of Ternivka, the company said 15 miners were killed. He later revised the death toll to at least 12 deaths.
Elsewhere, a man and a woman were killed by a drone strike in the central city of Dnipro, Ganzha said. He also reported that a 72-year-old man was injured in Nikopol.
Separately, a 59-year-old woman was seriously injured by a shelling in Kherson, while three other people were injured in a strike in Kharkiv, officials said.
Moscow launched a wave of targeted attacks against the Ukrainian power grid in January, leaving millions of people without heat or electricity during a bitterly cold winter – with temperatures expected to drop below -20C in places this weekend.
US President Donald Trump had said on Thursday that Putin had agreed to stop the attacks during the cold – the Kremlin later said the pause would expire on Sunday.
Also on Sunday, Ukraine said it was working with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to prevent Moscow from using the company’s Starlink satellite system for drone attacks.
kyiv’s military relies on the system to connect to the internet, but said this week it had found Starlink terminals on long-range drones used by Russia.
Musk said measures to stop this “unauthorized” use appeared to have worked, while Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov thanked him for being “a true friend of the Ukrainian people.”
Separately, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said a second round of three-way talks to end the fighting – nearly four years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine – would begin on Wednesday, rather than Sunday as planned.
He did not give a reason for the delay and said talks between Russian, Ukrainian and American officials would take place in Abu Dhabi.
Negotiations on a peace plan have been taking place for months under US mediation, with the main sticking point being Ukraine’s ceding territory to Russia.
Moscow currently controls about a fifth of Ukraine’s territory, including most of the eastern Donbass region. Ukraine wants kyiv to cede areas of Donbass that it has not yet taken by force, while Ukraine would like Russia to return control of its largest nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia.
Additional reporting by Richard Irvine-Brown, BBC Verify
