Russian glide bombs tore into residential buildings in the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia on Saturday, October 10, killing at least 20 people. Regional officials said on Sunday that the dead included four children, that more than 30 people were wounded, and that search-and-rescue operations at the site have now ended.
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| The Zaporizhzhia-1 railway station in the southern Ukrainian city hit by Russian glide bombs on Saturday. |
Five Bombs on Residential Buildings
According to Ukrainian officials, five glide bombs struck residential areas of the city on Saturday. One strike reduced part of an apartment block to rubble, and a six-year-old girl was among those killed when a strike hit her home, according to reporting by the Associated Press.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Saturday that twelve people had initially been confirmed killed, with fourteen injured — two of them critically — and the fate of twelve more people still being verified as rescuers worked through the debris. The toll climbed as the search continued, reaching 20 by Sunday, when Ivan Fedorov, the former regional head and co-chair of the regional defence council, confirmed the final figure and said eight of the wounded remained in hospital.
Zelenskyy also said thirteen Ukrainian regions came under attack overnight, with homes, infrastructure and railway facilities damaged across the country.
Kyiv Hit in a Rare Daytime Strike
Zaporizhzhia was not the only city struck on Saturday. Missiles also hit Kyiv in a daytime attack, and Mayor Vitali Klitschko said four people were wounded in the capital, according to AP reporting.
The southern city of Zaporizhzhia has been a regular target of Russian bombardment throughout the war, and officials say strikes on the city have intensified in recent months. Glide bombs — Soviet-era munitions fitted with wings and guidance systems — have become one of Russia's most destructive weapons against frontline cities, because they can be released from aircraft staying outside the range of much of Ukraine's air defence.
The Third Mass-Casualty Attack in a Week
Saturday's bombing was the third mass-casualty attack on Ukraine in a single week. According to AP, nearly 80 civilians were killed in Russian strikes on Wednesday and Thursday alone, including at least 30 people killed by a bomb in the eastern garrison city of Kramatorsk and 22 others killed by a missile in Pryluky, about 130 kilometres east of Kyiv.
The two countries remain locked in a long-range aerial war, even as their armies stay largely deadlocked along the front line more than four and a half years after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion. Ukraine has struggled to counter the escalating bombardment, and officials in Kyiv say more than 60 people were killed over a four-day span this week.
A War of Words Over the Diesel Deal
The attack landed in the middle of a sharp public row between Kyiv and Washington. On Friday, President Donald Trump announced a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to buy Russian diesel, an attempt to tackle high fuel prices ahead of next month's US midterm elections. Russia said on Saturday it had partially lifted its ban on diesel exports with immediate effect.
Zelenskyy reacted furiously, saying Russia had answered the easing of sanctions by dropping bombs on Zaporizhzhia, and arguing that Moscow reads any easing of pressure as permission to keep fighting. His exact words on X accused Russia of saying "thank you" for the sanctions relief with glide bombs.
Trump, for his part, blamed Zelenskyy for global diesel shortages and for Ukraine's strikes on Russian oil refineries, and on Saturday he publicly suggested Ukraine should replace its leader, saying Zelenskyy could have made deals but never does. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha pushed back on Saturday night, writing that Zelenskyy leads the country through a war for its independence, has the backing of Ukrainians, and that Ukrainians alone have the right to decide their leadership.
Kyiv had urged Washington to increase pressure on Moscow instead, in an effort to force serious negotiations to end the war.
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| File photo: Ukrainian emergency workers search the rubble of a destroyed building in Kharkiv after a Russian attack in January 2024. |
What This Means
The Zaporizhzhia strike underlines how civilians in Ukraine's frontline cities remain exposed even as diplomacy dominates the headlines. Glide bombs are cheap, plentiful and hard to intercept, and Saturday's attack shows Russia willing to use them on residential districts in broad daylight.
It also shows the widening gap between Washington and Kyiv. The two governments are now arguing in public — over diesel, over refinery strikes and over Ukraine's leadership itself — at the very moment Ukrainian and European officials have been meeting US negotiators to shape a proposal for ending the war. Those talks, held in Miami on Friday, were under way when the diesel deal was announced, a move Zelenskyy said caught Kyiv by surprise.
For Ukraine, the fear is straightforward: that economic relief for Moscow, without security guarantees or a ceasefire on the ground, will be read in the Kremlin as a green light. Saturday's bombs, in Kyiv's telling, are the evidence.
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| Kyiv's Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square); missiles also struck the capital in a daytime attack on Saturday. |
What Happens Next
With rescue work in Zaporizhzhia now complete, attention turns to the survivors — the wounded still in hospital, and the families who lost homes in the strike — and to whether the tempo of attacks on Ukrainian cities keeps rising in the days ahead.
Diplomatically, the coming days will test whether the Miami talks can produce a proposal both sides will even discuss, and whether Washington's diesel arrangement with Moscow survives the political storm it has created ahead of the November 3 midterms. Ukraine, meanwhile, has vowed to respond to Russian strikes, and its long-range attacks on Russian infrastructure have continued despite American objections.
What is certain is that Zaporizhzhia, a city that has endured bombardment for years, now has another date marked by grief — and that the argument over how this war should end is being fought as fiercely in public statements as it is on the battlefield.
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