Russian glide bomb attack in eastern Ukraine kills at least 24 people collecting their pensions

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DONETSK REGION, Ukraine (AP) — A Russian glide bomb struck a village in eastern Ukraine on Tuesday as people stood in line in the open air to collect their monthly pension. The blast killed at least 24 people and injured 19 others, the Ukraine Emergency Service said.

The bomb hit the Donetsk region village of Yarova at around 11 a.m. local time, authorities said. The village lies less than 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the front line. Donetsk regional head Vadym Filashkin said 23 of the dead were pensioners.

Yarova resident Hennadii Trush said his wife was killed in the blast as she waited to collect the pension of her bedridden mother-in-law. Afterward, Trush fled Yarova with his elderly mother, who was carried out on a stretcher.

In shock and with soot still on his face, Trush wept as he described the scene of the attack. “It was beyond words,” he told The Associated Press. “Before, strikes landed on the outskirts. This time it was right in the center of the village.”

It was the latest Russian attack to kill civilians. More than 12,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed in the three-year war, the United Nations says.

“Frankly brutal,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a post on Telegram of Tuesday's attack, urging the international community to make Russia pay economically for its full-scale invasion through additional sanctions.

“The world should not remain silent,” Zelenskyy wrote. “The world should not remain inactive. The United States needs a reaction. Europe needs a reaction. The G20 needs a reaction. Strong action is needed so that Russia stops bringing death.”

With U.S.-led peace efforts making no headway in recent months, Russia has escalated its aerial barrages of Ukraine. On Sunday, Russia hit the capital, Kyiv, with drones and missiles in the largest aerial attack since the war began on Feb. 24, 2022.

Pavlo Diachenko, head of communications for the Donetsk regional police, said he arrived at the scene in Yarova shortly after the strike.

“The picture was horrific — the whole village is on fire,” he told AP. “Private houses were burning, and people tried to put out the flames with their own hands. There were many drones overhead.”

Yarova is located north of the Donetsk city of Lyman, an area where Russia has intensified attacks recently as it probes for weaknesses in Ukrainian defenses and seeks to advance into northern parts of the region.

Despite the risks, many people remain in their homes because they have no means of relocating or they need to care for elderly relatives with disabilities.

Russia has been scaling up its aerial attacks, despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s attempts to persuade Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to agree to a ceasefire and enter peace talks with Zelenskyy — proposals that Ukraine has endorsed.

European Council President Antonio Costa rebuked the Kremlin for its repeated strikes on civilians.

“Is this what Russia means when it talks about peace?” Costa asked on social media. “When will President Putin accept to start peace talks already accepted by President Zelenskyy?”

The major barrages have prompted concerns that Ukraine is using up its air defenses quicker than they can be replaced by its Western allies.

U.S. and European officials met at the U.S. Treasury Department on Monday evening to discuss various forms of economic pressure to exert on Russia, including new sanctions and tariffs on Russian oil purchases, a person familiar with the meeting told AP.

The talks were expected to continue Tuesday.

Glide bombs are retrofitted Soviet weapons that have laid waste to eastern Ukraine for months. Some of them now weigh 3,000 pounds (1,360 kilograms), which is six times bigger than when they were first used in battle in 2022.

In Ukrainian villages, where there are no ATMs and older people are unfamiliar with digital banking, pensions are commonly delivered to the local post office on a certain day of every month. Retirees stand in line to pick up their pension in cash.

Photos and video of the scene posted on official Ukrainian channels showed bodies lying around a damaged white car with yellow branding that was parked beneath trees.

The vehicle damaged in the attack was a mobile post office, Ukrposhta’s network development director for the Dnipro and Donetsk regions, Maksym Sutkovyi, said in a phone interview.

The village post office closed down just a week ago, he said, after the last two staff decided to evacuate. It was the only place where locals could collect their pension, top up a cell phone account or even buy some essential goods, he said.

The head of Ukraine’s national postal service, Ukrposhta, said the company constantly changes security procedures. Ihor Smilianskyi said the car was parked under trees to reduce the risk of it being spotted by the enemy.

“But apparently, someone gave away the coordinates,” Smilianskyi wrote on Facebook.

The territory was occupied by Russia in 2022, but was liberated by Ukraine’s armed forces in a counteroffensive later the same year.

The dead were taken to a local morgue. Multiple bodies lay in the intake hall as forensic teams tried to identify them. Many had died from blast injuries.

Zinaida Hrymailo went there to identify the body of her cousin, a 75-year-old woman killed in the strike. “They were all lying in one heap. My sister has been completely burned,” Hrymailo said.

As the cousin died while collecting the pension, her paralyzed husband remained in the village all alone, according to Hrymailo.

Her cousin, she added, had been preparing to leave Yarova after collecting her pension. “Everything had been prepared, they were going to leave.”

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Novikov reported from Kyiv, Ukraine. Fatima Hussein contributed to this report from Washington.

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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine