Twelve miners killed by Russian drone strike in Ukraine bus

Hind Al Soulia - Riyadh - KYIV — Twelve miners have been killed and a dozen others injured by a Russian drone strike on a bus outside the city of Pavlohrad in the Dnipropetrovsk in eastern Ukraine, the country's largest private energy firm have said.

Ukraine's biggest private energy firm DTEK said Russia launched a mass attack, targeting DTEK mines, on Sunday. One of the strikes hit a service bus in the town of Ternivka, which was transporting miners home after their shift.

"The service bus was carrying mine workers — civilians who were not involved in the combat. This is yet another brutal attack with casualties, just for today," Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said.

Earlier in the day, a Russian attack caused damage to a maternity hospital in Zaporizhzhia, injuring at least nine people, including a child, Ukrainian authorities said on Sunday. Two were women giving birth at the time of the strike.

In a post on Telegram, Zaporizhzhia regional head Ivan Fedorov called it further "proof of a war directed against life".

Footage shared across social media carried the watermarks of national and local administrations and showed offices, rooms with beds for patients, and a children's room with the windows broken and covered in debris.

Some footage showed degrees of fire damage, while two videos showed a fire still burning on the first storey. Another showed fire fighters breaking down interior doors and ferrying patients away.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha said the hospital attack showed Russian President Vladimir Putin was pursuing a "war against civilians contrary to peace efforts".

Fedorov later reported three people had been injured by a separate strike in a residential area.

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Elsewhere, a man and a woman were killed by a drone strike in the central city of Dnipro, Ganzha said. He also reported that a 72-year-old man had been injured in Nikopol.

Separately, a 59-year-old woman was seriously wounded by shelling in Kherson, while three others were injured in a strike in Kharkiv, officials said.

Moscow launched a wave of targeted attacks on Ukraine's power grid in January, leaving millions without heating or electricity during an extraordinarily cold winter - with temperatures forecast to plunge below -20C in places this weekend.

US President Donald Trump had said on Thursday that Putin had agreed to halt attacks during the cold - the Kremlin later said the pause would expire on Sunday.

Also on Sunday, Ukraine said it was working with Elon Musk's SpaceX to stop Moscow using the firm's Starlink satellite system for drone attacks.

Kyiv's military relies on the system for internet connection, but said this week it had found Starlink terminals on long-range drones used by Russia.

Musk said steps to stop the "unauthorised" use appeared to have worked, while Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov thanked him for being "a true friend of the Ukrainian people".

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said a second round of three-way talks to end the fighting — nearly four years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine — would begin on Wednesday, rather than Sunday as had been planned.

He did not give a reason for the delay, and said the talks between Russian, Ukrainian and US officials would take place in Abu Dhabi. — Agencies