A Russian drone attack on a public minibus in Kherson killed two people and wounded seven on Saturday, according to regional head Oleksandr Prokudin. Hours later, a second strike targeted another minibus in the southern city, leaving the driver injured, Prokudin added. The assaults mark the latest in a sustained campaign of aerial attacks targeting Ukrainian population centers.
The civilian strikes in Kherson occurred alongside renewed attacks elsewhere in the country. A Russian strike damaged port infrastructure in the Black Sea city of Odesa without reported casualties, Ukrainian officials said.
Meanwhile, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy highlighted a separate concern along Ukraine’s northern frontier. Zelenskyy wrote on Telegram Saturday that Ukrainian forces had observed “rather unusual” activity on the Belarusian side of the border on Friday.
“We are closely documenting and keeping the situation under control. If necessary, we will react,” Zelenskyy said in the post.
Belarus, a key Kremlin ally, has permitted Russia to use its territory as a staging ground for ground troops since the full-scale invasion began, and it hosts some of Moscow’s tactical nuclear weapons. Any escalation from the north would open a second ground front that Kyiv has worked to avoid.
On the roughly 1,250-kilometer (750-mile) frontline, Russia’s defense ministry claimed Saturday that it had captured the village of Myropillia in the northeastern Sumy region. Ukrainian officials did not immediately comment on the battlefield report, and independent verification was not possible.
Inside Russia, Ukrainian drone campaigns continued to target energy infrastructure. A fire that ignited after a strike on an oil terminal in the Black Sea city of Tuapse was extinguished Saturday, local officials in the Krasnodar region said. Ukrainian drones have hit the Tuapse refinery and export terminal four times in just over two weeks, triggering evacuations and producing heavy smoke plumes.
Ukraine has intensified long-range strikes on Russian oil facilities to disrupt a major funding stream for the invasion. The immediate economic impact remains unclear, however. A spike in global oil prices tied to the Iran war, combined with a recent easing of U.S. sanctions, has helped replenish Kremlin revenues despite the infrastructure damage.
Diplomatic efforts have failed to produce an end to the fighting. U.S.-brokered talks between Moscow and Kyiv over the past year have yielded no ceasefire agreement after Russia rejected Ukraine’s offers. In recent weeks, international attention has increasingly focused on the Iran conflict, leaving Ukraine’s plight with fewer diplomatic resources on the global stage.