Russian drone strike on workers’ bus in Marhanets kills nine, Ukraine says
Event date: April 23, 2025. A Russian drone strike hit a workers’ bus in the Ukrainian city of Marhanets, killing nine people and injuring close to 50, according to Ukrainian officials cited by The Guardian.
The attack drew immediate condemnation from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who called it a deliberate war crime. The Guardian reported that the bus was carrying workers to a mining and processing plant when it was struck early on Wednesday.
Zelenskyy said the vehicle was an ordinary civilian bus and that the strike was aimed at a clearly civilian target. The report said he posted photographs of the aftermath on X, showing bodies lying in and around the bus and being carried away by emergency workers.
Marhanets is in south-central Ukraine, on the Ukrainian-controlled north bank of the Dnipro River reservoir that separates the two sides. That geography matters because the city sits close enough to front-line conditions that civilian transport routes remain vulnerable to drone and artillery attacks.
The Guardian report said most of the injured were women. It also said Russia launched 134 attack drones overnight, part of a broader wave of strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure.
Elsewhere in Ukraine, the same report described further damage in several regions. An energy plant that supplies electricity to the city of Kherson was destroyed in an artillery and drone strike, while a drone attack in the Dnipropetrovsk region injured two people and sparked a fire at an agricultural enterprise.
In the central Poltava region, at least six people were injured when drones struck, and in Odesa, a civilian infrastructure attack injured two people and caused several fires. The report also said drones set off large-scale fires in Kharkiv and damaged homes and storage buildings in the Kyiv region.
The bus strike in Marhanets stood out because of the clear civilian context. Transporting workers to and from industrial sites is ordinary daily life, and the report made clear that the vehicle was not carrying soldiers or military equipment. That distinction is central to Zelenskyy’s war-crimes accusation.
The broader assault also underlined how Russian attacks were reaching beyond one location. Instead of a single isolated hit, the overnight barrage produced a chain of damage across Ukraine’s south, east and center, hitting power infrastructure, homes and businesses as well as the bus in Marhanets.
For Ukraine, the strike became another example of the toll borne by civilians in cities near the front. For Russia, the attack fit into a larger pattern of pressure on infrastructure and transport, even as international leaders continued to talk about ceasefire diplomacy.
The Guardian report said Russia and Ukraine were both under pressure from the United States to show progress toward ending the war. But on April 23, the story on the ground was one of civilian casualties, damaged energy systems and repeated drone strikes across the country.
In Marhanets, the immediate outcome was stark: a bus full of workers reduced to a scene of death and injury, with rescue crews and local officials left to count the cost of another attack on a civilian target.
