The death toll from Russia’s bombing of a humanitarian aid centre in southern Ukraine has climbed to 29, with 48 people still unaccounted for, as rescue teams picked through the wreckage for a second day under the threat of further strikes.
Regional officials in Zaporizhzhia confirmed the revised figures on Tuesday, up from the 26 dead reported on Monday evening. Five people were hurt in the attack on the village of Komyshuvakha, and the region declared Tuesday a day of mourning.
The victims include two rescue workers, Denys Konovalenko and Oleksii Sushchevskyi, both 44, and four police officers, killed when a second wave of bombs hit the shelter where survivors and responders had taken cover. Residents had gathered at a school building, closed as a school because of its closeness to the front line, to collect weekly food and supplies when the first bombs fell on Monday. According to regional head Mykhailo Semikin, at least nine heavy aerial bombs struck the site.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has described the attack as exceptionally horrific, saying Russian pilots could not have failed to know that local people collected aid at the building every week. Russia has not publicly commented on the Komyshuvakha strike.
The revised toll emerged alongside a vast overnight barrage across Ukraine. Zelenskyy said Russia launched 289 attack drones, 17 ballistic missiles and 59 cruise missiles overnight, aimed chiefly at energy infrastructure — power stations and substations — across nine regions, from Odesa and Vinnytsia in the south and centre to Chernihiv and Rivne in the north. Emergency power cuts followed in Kyiv, the surrounding Kyiv region and Dnipropetrovsk region, according to grid operator Ukrenergo, and air raid alerts remained in force into Tuesday morning.
Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, was among the hardest hit. A strike damaged a medical facility in the city’s Nemyshlianskyi district, shattering more than 1,000 windows across the facility and nearby apartment blocks. Local authorities said at least 62 people were wounded there, and around 200 patients were moved to other hospitals. In the Dnipro area, rescuers pulled a woman alive from rubble on Tuesday morning after an attack that killed one person and wounded 17.
Moscow, for its part, said its air defences shot down 856 Ukrainian drones overnight, and the mayor of Moscow said 493 drones had been aimed at the capital. Those claims could not be independently verified.
Zelenskyy drew attention to the timing of the barrage, which fell on the day Americans voted in congressional midterm elections. “The Russians think America won’t notice this signal of theirs,” he said. “But we need to notice and stop such terror. We need to help Ukraine defend its skies; otherwise, Russia will never stop its missile strikes.”
The escalation lands a week before American-mediated talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegations are due to open in Abu Dhabi on 10–11 November, a meeting Washington hopes will advance a settlement. It also follows the end of a six-day local truce around the occupied town of Oleshky, which had allowed starving residents to be evacuated — a pause that now looks, in hindsight, like an interlude rather than a turning point.
Why this matters beyond Ukraine’s borders: the pattern of the last two days — an aid queue bombed twice, a hospital damaged, and the power grid struck as winter approaches — is aimed at the systems that keep civilians alive, not just at armies in the field. Each strike on energy infrastructure makes the coming cold months harder to survive, and each attack timed to a distracted news cycle tests whether the world’s attention, and its air-defence supplies, will hold. With negotiators due in Abu Dhabi within days, the barrage also sets the backdrop for those talks: Kyiv arrives able to point to fresh wreckage, and Moscow arrives having shown it can still escalate at will.
Search operations in Komyshuvakha continue as far as the security situation allows, officials said, with the toll expected to change again as more of the collapsed buildings are cleared. The figures in this article come from Ukrainian regional and emergency authorities and have not been independently verified on the ground.
Earlier coverage: our first report on the Komyshuvakha bombing, and the toll update that put the dead at 26. The Abu Dhabi talks are covered here.
