Russian drones struck a bus carrying mineworkers in Ukraine’s Dnipro on Feb. 1, killing at least 12 people, Ukrainian authorities said, as the government announced a renewed schedule for peace talks with U.S. involvement.
Ukrainian authorities said the attack hit the bus and killed at least a dozen people. They said the strike injured several more people and sparked a fire that emergency services later put out.
DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, said it owned the bus and accused Russia of carrying out “a large-scale terrorist attack on DTEK mines in the Dnipropetrovsk region,” whose capital is Dnipro. In a Telegram post, the company said the “epicenter of one of the attacks” involved a company bus transporting miners from the enterprise after a shift in the region.
Ukraine’s Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal called the strike “a cynical and targeted attack on energy sector workers,” and said it occurred near the Ternivska mine east of the city. Separate reporting from the same day also pointed to strikes beyond Dnipro, including drone damage described elsewhere in southern and eastern Ukraine.
Hours earlier on Sunday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the next trilateral meetings between Russian and Ukrainian delegations, with the U.S. involved, would be held next week rather than Sunday in Abu Dhabi. Zelenskyy said in a Telegram post that the dates had been set for Feb. 4 and 5 in Abu Dhabi, and said Ukraine was ready for substantive talks aimed at ending the war “with a real and dignified end.”
The Kremlin confirmed Friday that it had agreed to temporarily halt striking Kyiv until Sunday, but it did not provide details that would allow an independent assessment of whether the pause had been carried out. The Associated Press said there was no immediate comment from U.S. or Russian officials about the shifted meetings schedule.
Ukrainian emergency services also reported earlier Sunday that Russian attack drones hit a maternity hospital in Zaporizhzhia, in southern Ukraine. Emergency services said the strike wounded three women and sparked a fire in the gynecology reception area that was later extinguished, and the regional administration head Ivan Fedorov later said the number injured rose to six.
Beyond the morning and afternoon strikes described by Ukrainian authorities, the report said Russia launched 90 attack drones overnight, with 14 striking nine locations, according to Ukraine’s air force. The same reporting said a woman and a man were killed in an overnight drone strike in Dnipro, according to the local administration head Oleksandr Hanzha.
Ukraine also reported that Russian shelling hit central Kherson soon after 7 a.m., seriously wounding a 59-year-old woman, according to a Facebook post by the municipal military administration. Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces used operational-tactical aviation, attack drones, missile forces and artillery to strike transport infrastructure used by Ukrainian forces, and it said Russian air defenses shot down 21 Ukrainian drones flying over southwestern and western Russia without mentioning casualties or damage.
The events came amid a broader push by the Trump administration to steer both sides toward a peace deal and end nearly four years of all-out war, even as Ukrainian and Russian officials continue to differ on what any agreement would require, including the status of occupied areas and the territory Russia has captured or not yet captured, especially Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.