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Nine people have been killed in a Russian drone attack on a minibus that local authorities say was evacuating civilians in Ukraine’s northern Sumy region.
Local authorities said that most of those killed were elderly women being evacuated from Bilopillya, a town in the Sumy region that has come under repeated Russian attack.
The strike on the bus on Saturday morning with at least one Lancet drone, also injured four other passengers and came just hours after the first direct peace talks between Kyiv and Moscow since 2022 broke up inconclusively after two hours.
Images from the attack showed the bus on a country road with its roof ripped off by the blast.
“This bus was carrying people out of the city for evacuation,” the head of the town’s administration, Yurii Zarko, told the Suspilne news site, as he declared three days of mourning in Bilopillya.
“Wounded were treated at the scene and then moved to a hospital in Sumy. We are currently retrieving the bodies. Some victims have not yet been identified. Most of them are elderly women, along with two or three men.”
Residents in Bilopillya – about 6 miles (10km) from the frontline – and the nearby town of Vorozhba were urged to relocate on 5 May because of continued Russian shelling, and daily bus evacuations have been continuing since then.
“This is another war crime by Russia – a deliberate strike on civilian transport that posed no threat,” the Sumy regional administration said in a post on the Telegram messaging app.
The bus was travelling towards Sumy at about 6am when it was “targeted by the Russians”, the military administration added.
“The bus was moving to Sumy on its usual route when Russia launched a targeted strike,” Serhiy Kryvosheenko, the head of the Sumy city military administration, said on Telegram.
Russia’s Tass state news agency, citing a statement from the defence ministry, reported that Russian forces had struck a Ukrainian military equipment staging area in the Sumy region with drones.
The blast came hours after Russia and Ukraine concluded their first direct talks in almost three years in Istanbul without a significant breakthrough. The two sides agreed a large-scale prisoner exchange but no ceasefire, saying instead they would commit to trade ideas on a possible truce.
After the talks, Kyiv said it was seeking an “unconditional ceasefire” to pause the conflict, which has destroyed large swathes of Ukraine and displaced millions of people.
But Moscow has consistently rebuffed those calls and the only concrete agreement appeared to be the deal to exchange 1,000 prisoners each.
After the meeting, Volodymyr Zelenskyy renewed his calls for sanctions on Moscow if it failed to agree to a ceasefire. “Our position – if the Russians reject a full and unconditional ceasefire and an end to killings, tough sanctions must follow,” the Ukrainian president said on X.
“Pressure on Russia must be maintained until Russia is ready to end the war.”
Ukraine’s top negotiator, the defence minister Rustem Umerov, said the “next step” would be a meeting between the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and Zelenskyy.
Both Moscow and Washington have also talked up the need for a meeting on the conflict between Putin and the US president, Donald Trump.
