Russian attacks across Ukraine killed at least three people and injured several others, Ukrainian officials said on January 28, just hours after a deadly attack on a passenger train in the Kharkiv region that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy denounced as “terrorism.”
In the Kyiv region, an apartment building where RFE/RL correspondent Marian Kushnir lives was hit, killing at least two people and sparking a fire. Kushnir, who covers the front line of the war with Russia, rescued a 4-year-old girl from the blaze. Her mother and partner were killed in the strike.
Medics treated the rescued girl, another child, and two adults at the scene, Ukraine’s National Police said.
“I was at home when I heard an explosion. A drone struck the roof of our building, the upper two-story apartment,” said Kushnir, who has worked for RFE/RL’s Ukrainian-language service for more than a decade.
“I saw half-open doors to the place where the impact was. I opened them and saw a child lying on a couch, wrapped in a blanket, crying, screaming, calling for her mother.”
Kushnir, an award-winning correspondent who has regularly reported from the front-lines of the war since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, said that with the fire spreading quickly, he carried the child to safety before heading back into the building to search for more survivors.
However, the impact location of the drone trapped those upstairs — the mother and her partner — who were later declared dead.
“When I carried the little girl out, she started crying a lot and then began to shake badly, she hugged me. And then it became very painful for me, because in 10 years of war I had never felt anything like this, when, holding in my arms a 4-year-old child who was crying, I realized that her mother is dead.”
In the central Dnipropetrovsk region, a drone strike on January 27 killed a 46-year-old man and injured five others, one of them seriously, according to the regional authorities.
Russian forces launched another attack on Kyiv, hitting a 17-story residential building and damaging the roof, upper-floor windows, and nearby parked cars. No casualties were reported, according to preliminary information from Ukraine’s Emergency Service.
Deadly Attack On Passenger Train
The overnight strikes followed a deadly Russian drone attack on a passenger train in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region on January 27. Ukrainian authorities said at least five passengers were killed.
Russian forces attacked with three Shahed drones, striking near the locomotive and a passenger car, Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Kuleba said, adding that 291 passengers, including children, were on board.
Kuleba said 18 people were in the carriage hit by one of the Russian drones.
Zelenskyy condemned the strike, calling it “purely an act of terrorism” and saying there could be no military justification for killing civilians in a train carriage.
“In any country, a drone strike on a civilian train would be regarded in the same way — purely as an act of terrorism,” he wrote in a post on X.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said the attack was a deliberate strike on civilians and described it as a crime against humanity.
“A deliberate strike on a civilian train is pure terrorism, a conscious crime against peaceful people and against humanity itself,” she said on X.
“Russia must be held accountable for every such attack. The means by which Russians continue to inflict atrocities on our people are only growing,” she added.
The Kharkiv Regional Prosecutor’s Office confirmed the death of five passengers, adding that the identification of the victims would only be possible after DNA testing.
Ukraine’s State Emergency Service later clarified that the final number of victims would be determined once the tests are completed.
Russia denies intentionally targeting civilians in Ukraine despite widespread evidence to the contrary, including the latest attack on a passenger train, since launching its full-scale invasion in 2022.
