Komyshuvakha is a village in the Zaporizhzhia region of southern Ukraine. For the people who stayed on there, a school building had become the place where humanitarian packages were given out, once a week, every week. On Monday, the 2nd of November, Russian guided bombs hit that school. Then they hit the shelter nearby.
By Tuesday at least 31 people were dead, Pjotr Sauer reported in The Guardian. Mykhailo Semikin, acting head of the regional military administration, said four police officers and two rescue workers were among them. Five people were hurt. Forty-eight were listed as missing, and in a later update Semikin put the missing at nearly 50. The count had risen by stages, from 18 in Volodymyr Zelensky’s first report on Monday to 29 by Tuesday morning, and then to 31.
Semikin said the first bombs were FAB-500s and the second wave FAB-3000s, three-ton aerial bombs. When rescuers tried to reach people on Monday evening, Russian drones attacked the bombed area again, he said. After dark, emergency crews searched the collapsed buildings by torchlight, according to photos and video posted by local officials. The region has declared three days of mourning, from 3 to 5 November, and Semikin called the attack one of the deadliest tragedies the region has suffered since the full-scale invasion began.
Zelensky said the Russians could not have failed to know that the remaining residents gathered at the site each week to collect their packages. “Russians continue to demonstrate, time and again, their hatred of Ukraine and everything that exists here,” he said.
A reflection, not a finding: a fixed weekly schedule is something people in a war zone build to stay alive. It means a queue, a known day, a known door. That same predictability makes them easy to find.
Kharkiv, a little after three
Overnight into Tuesday the north-east was hit. Kharkiv came under a combined attack at around 3 a.m., according to the mayor, Ihor Terekhov, and the Prosecutor General’s Office said a strike hit the Nemyshlianskyi district at about 3:20 a.m., damaging a passageway between buildings of a medical facility. As Al Jazeera reported, Zelensky wrote on X that “the Russians directly struck a city clinical hospital. Seventy-three people were injured, and the cardiology department, where people were receiving treatment, was damaged.”
The number of injured grew over the day, so different reports give different figures. The regional governor, Oleh Syniehubov, first said 25, then 62, the number local authorities gave The Guardian and Meduza. The Prosecutor General’s Office later put it at 73, Ukrainska Pravda reported, counting patients, medical staff and people living nearby. No deaths have been reported from the hospital. Syniehubov said more than 200 patients had been moved to other hospitals; Ukrainska Pravda gave the exact number as 226. Windows were blown out in four apartment buildings and cars were damaged.
One night’s count
Zelensky said Russia launched 289 attack drones, 17 ballistic missiles and 59 cruise missiles at nine regions. That is 365 weapons in one night. Power plants were among the targets, and emergency power cuts followed.
He tied the timing to Washington, where the midterm elections were drawing American attention. “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 truce that was
The bombs fell a day after a rare local ceasefire in neighbouring Kherson came to an end. That truce, brokered by the US first lady, Melania Trump, allowed civilians to be evacuated from Russian-occupied Oleshky. It was the longest pause in fighting in a war now in its fifth year, a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and driven millions from their homes. The Kremlin said no similar missions were planned “at the moment”.
“If Russia genuinely wanted de-escalation, there was an opportunity following the situation in Oleshky to continue taking humanitarian steps. We proposed this. But Russia continues to kill people,” Zelensky said.
Another reflection: in this war a truce is something one side grants and can withdraw. Moscow allowed an evacuation, then said there would be no more, and a day later the bombers were over a village queuing for aid.
Abu Dhabi, Berlin
The US special envoy, Steve Witkoff, said on Monday that US-led talks between Russia and Ukraine would resume in Abu Dhabi on 10 and 11 November. Donald Trump promised during his campaign to end the war in a single day. He has pushed repeatedly for a settlement and has not achieved one. Meanwhile Kyiv and its European allies have grown more uneasy about his close ties with Moscow and about talk of business deals between the two countries.
On Tuesday Russia said its delegation would be led by Vladimir Medinsky, a hardline former culture minister who has headed several earlier rounds. Ukrainian officials and analysts were sceptical when he was first named, doubting he had the authority to make real concessions. He is one of the main authors of the historical revisionism Vladimir Putin has used to justify the invasion, and he has long promoted the Kremlin line that Ukraine cannot be separated from Russia.
Zelensky, meanwhile, flew to Berlin to meet Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Since Merz took office in May 2025, Germany has become Ukraine’s largest supplier of military aid, overtaking the United States as American support has fallen. Zelensky is also expected at this year’s Berlin Security Conference.
The mourning in Zaporizhzhia ends on Thursday. The talks in Abu Dhabi begin the following Tuesday.