Five Killed as Russian Drone Hits Shopping Centre in Central Ukraine

Five people were killed and 67 wounded when a Russian drone struck a shopping centre in Pavlohrad, a city in Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk region, Ukrainian officials have said. The daylight attack hit shops and vehicles at a time when the streets were full of people, according to Interior Minister Ivan Vyhivskyi. Among the injured are eight children, the regional governor, Oleksandr Hanzha, confirmed in a post on Telegram.

Images released by Ukraine's State Emergency Service showed firefighters directing water hoses at burning vehicles amid clouds of smoke on a street in the city. Pavlohrad, a logistics hub near the central city of Dnipro, has endured heavy bombardment before. Two people were killed in a strike on warehouses there last month.

President Volodymyr Zelensky offered his condolences to the families and loved ones of those killed. The Russians, he said, used drones to kill people who were simply standing near shopping centres. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha described the assault as a tactic of coercion. Russia believes, he said, that relentless attacks on civilians can exhaust Ukrainians and force Ukraine into concession.

The strike is the latest in a sustained Russian campaign against civilian infrastructure. Two other shopping centres, in the cities of Zaporizhzhia and Sumy, were targeted by Russian air strikes earlier this week. A Russian drone attack on a mall in Sumy on Wednesday killed two people and wounded 20, while aerial bombing there on Thursday reportedly injured eight more, including three children. In Zaporizhzhia, a shopping centre was almost completely destroyed on Monday, its owners reported, though it was closed at the time and no casualties were immediately reported.

One of the bloodiest attacks on such a site came last month, when Ukrainian officials said Russian drones killed at least 16 people and injured 130 in the city of Kryvyi Rih. Shopping centres in Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine have also come under attack, with a Ukrainian drone strike reported on Monday on a mall in the port city of Mariupol, in the Donetsk region, and another on the city of Donetsk last month.

Moscow reported its own casualties. Russian officials said Ukrainian seaborne drones attacked the shoreline at the resort city of Sochi overnight on Wednesday, wounding 28 people, two of them children. Three further deaths were blamed on Ukrainian attacks. On Thursday, officials said a Ukrainian drone strike on the town of Novy Oskol, in the Belgorod region, killed one person and wounded six. A Ukrainian attack on a car in Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia on Wednesday killed a girl of 15 and injured a six-year-old child and two women, they said, while a separate attack on a civilian lorry in the same region killed a man.

A full-scale war has raged between Russia and Ukraine since President Vladimir Putin launched his unprovoked invasion more than four and a half years ago. A fresh peacemaking effort by envoys sent by US President Donald Trump at the weekend appears to have yielded few concrete results, after talks in Moscow with Putin and in Kyiv with President Zelensky. The World House, which maintains a dedicated page detailing its support for Ukraine at worldhouse.uk/support, continues to document the human cost of Russia's aggression.