A Russian jet-powered drone slammed into the crowded central market in Chornomorsk, in Ukraine's southern Odesa region, on Wednesday, killing three people and injuring 11, regional governor Oleh Kiper said. The Ukrainian Air Force had warned at 11:26 a.m. that a Russian jet-powered drone was heading toward the city, and the strike hit a market Kiper described as a place that is always crowded at that time of day.
Kiper first reported one person killed and four injured. The toll then rose: 11 people were injured in all, nine of them taken to hospital with four in serious condition and one treated at the scene, and at 2:06 p.m. Kiper reported that two of the critically injured had died in hospital, bringing the death toll to three. “The enemy launched a treacherous strike on a market in the center of Chornomorsk — a place that is always crowded at this time,” Kiper wrote on Telegram. The blast damaged nearby residential buildings and cars, and the State Emergency Service said a private home was damaged and caught fire, with crews working at the scene to put out the blaze.
The market strike came hours after a heavy overnight attack on Ukraine's power system. Prime Minister Sergii Koretskyi said Russian forces hit six large electricity substations in four regions — Vinnytsia, Kirovohrad, Zhytomyr and Cherkasy — damaged power lines in Kirovohrad and Rivne, struck a heat supply facility in Kryvy Rih that serves residential buildings, and hit railway infrastructure in the east and centre. The grid operator Ukrenergo reported partial outages in eight regions, including Odesa, and in the Odesa region itself, attacks on energy infrastructure on Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning triggered emergency outages that left approximately 135,000 consumers without electricity in parts of the Bolhrad, Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi and Odesa districts.
For the people caught in it, this was an attack on an ordinary shopping day: vendors and customers in a central market, homes and cars wrecked around them, and a private house on fire. It lands on top of the blackout campaign — families across the Odesa region already sitting without power, and households across Ukraine facing winter with substations, heating plants and railways being hit night after night, which means higher repair bills, interrupted work and school days, and homes that are harder to heat.
The strike also landed on the day the United States' peace effort reached its latest marker. Two days of U.S.-mediated talks in Abu Dhabi ended on Wednesday with Russia and Ukraine agreeing what U.S. negotiator Jared Kushner called the biggest humanitarian release of prisoners, with the numbers to be finalized on Thursday — but with no ceasefire, and with Russia's chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky ruling out any exchange of territory, the central dispute, as part of a deal. U.S. envoys Kushner and Steve Witkoff travel next to Moscow and then to Dublin to meet President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Honestly stated, that is where Washington's process stands: it is producing prisoner exchanges, which matter enormously to the families involved, but it has not yet stopped the drones — and a crowded market in Chornomorsk is the measure of that gap.
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