The death toll from Russia’s attack on a passenger train in Kharkiv oblast on 27 January at present stands at five but is likely to rise. Russia is not content with trying to freeze Ukrainian civilians to death by systematically bombing electricity and gas supplies. It also seeks maximum carnage by aiming assault drones at evidently civilian targets. Among the dead from the passenger train attack was a 25-year-old who had set off to be with her mother on the latter’s birthday. Another Russian drone deliberately gunned down a woman and then returned, to try to hit her husband who had been trying to evacuate both to safety.
Three assault drones were used against a passenger train travelling near the village of Yazykove in Kharkiv oblast. One directly hit a train carriage, engulfing it in flames. Late on 27 January, Ukraine’s Emergency Services reported that the bodies of five victims had been recovered. Since other remains were also found, it is near certain that the death toll will be higher. The train was carrying at least 155 passengers, with reports suggesting that the carriage which swiftly became an inferno had 18 people in it. In condemning the attack, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy noted that “in any country, a drone strike on a civilian train would be regarded in the same way – purely as an act of terrorism. There is, and can be, no military justification for killing civilians in a train carriage.”
This was only one of several Russian attacks, deliberately targeting civilians, on 27 January alone, including two attacks in Zaporizhzhia oblast on minivan cabs carrying passengers to Zaporizhzhia. There were, thankfully, no fatalities, although those who directed drones at civilian vehicles clearly hoped there would be.
In Sumy oblast, a couple trying to flee the border village of Hrabovske were gunned down, with video footage reposted by Ukraine’s Prosecutor General making it clear just how deliberate and murderous the attack was. According to Oleh Hryhorov, Head of the Sumy Regional Administration, the victims were a 54-year-old man who was trying to evacuate his wounded 52-year-old wife, pulling her in some kind of toboggan. The Russian drone first targeted and killed the woman, and then returned, killing her husband.
In all these cases, criminal proceedings have been initiated under Article 438 § 2 of Ukraine’s Criminal Code – a war crime causing fatalities.
At least three civilians were also killed in Odesa during a night of strikes on civilian targets, with at least 35 injured. A pregnant woman and two children were among those who were hospitalized. Here, as always, the number of victims could rise as Russia struck at least one residential building, with it taking time to safely search through and clear the rubble.
While Russia’s leaders deny any attacks on civilians and use repressive legislation to sentence those who tell the truth to seven years or more imprisonment, Russian propagandists generally claim justification for or even gloat about attacks on civilians. They make no attempt to deny that Russia’s systematic attacks on power stations are aimed at leaving hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, especially in Kyiv and Kharkiv, without electricity, heating and water in temperatures well below freezing. Quite the contrary, they have sneeringly called this ‘Kholodomor’ [using the word for cold ‘kholod’ to associate Ukrainians’ suffering with the Holodomor, or manmade famine of 1932-33.] If Ukrainians are freezing to death, it’s ‘their fault’, according to this propaganda narrative, because they should overthrow Zelenskyy, etc.
The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine reported on 12 January 2026 that 2025 had been the deadliest year for civilians in Ukraine since 2022, with over 2,500 deaths recorded. While such reports seek to observe ‘neutrality’, the fact that 97% of the attacks were in Ukrainian government-controlled territory leaves no scope for doubting who was behind this massive increase.
The UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine first addressed Russia’s use of drone attacks on civilians in May 2025. Its report then specifically focused on drone attacks in Kherson oblast, and stated that Russia had, since July 2024, been using drones to drop explosives and kill civilians in Kherson oblast, as well as in double-tap strikes, where ambulance workers were targeted after they rushed to the scene of such attacks. There were compelling grounds, it concluded, for viewing such violations of international law as deliberate state policy and as crimes against humanity.
In October 2025, the Commission further documented such attacks on civilian targets, with these over an area of 300 kilometres along the right bank of the Dnipro River, across Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson, and Mykolaiv oblasts. The Commission’s conclusions were even more damning. It is already a war crime to deliberately target civilians, but Russia is also guilty of two crimes against humanity through its systematic and state-coordinated measures to drive out Ukrainian civilians from their place of residence. The drone attacks, the Commission concluded, amount to the crimes against humanity of murder and of forcible transfer of population.
