Russian attack kills civilians collecting pensions in Ukrainian village

A Russian glide bomb struck a village in eastern Ukraine as older people were lined up to receive their pensions on Tuesday, killing at least 21 and wounding nearly two dozen others, President Volodymyr Zelensky and a regional official said.

The bomb hit the village of Yarova in the Donetsk region, Mr Zelensky said in a post on Telegram.

“Frankly brutal”, he said of the attack, urging the international community to make Russia pay economically for its full-scale invasion through additional sanctions.

“The world should not remain silent,” Mr Zelensky 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 US-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 February 24, 2022.

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

Donetsk governor Vadym Filashkin said that 21 people were killed and 21 others wounded in the attack, which struck a line of older people waiting to receive their pensions.

“This is not warfare. This is pure terrorism,” he wrote on Telegram.

Emergency responders were at the scene, he said.

Yarova is located less than six miles from the front line.

The territory was already occupied by Russia in 2022, but was then liberated by Ukraine’s armed forces in a counter-offensive later the same year.