A Russian drone attack killed at least nine people on Saturday after hitting a shuttle bus carrying civilians in the Sumy region in northeastern Ukraine, according to local residents and Ukrainian authorities.
The deadly strike came hours after Ukrainian and Russian officials sat down face to face for the first time in more than three years in Istanbul.
At the brief meeting, the two sides agreed on a deal to swap 1,000 prisoners each. But the talks and the frenetic swirl of diplomatic activity leading up to them did nothing to bring the two sides closer to negotiating an end to the war and easing the daily carnage, with soldiers on both sides being killed and injured on the front every day, and the civilian toll steadily rising.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Saturday that the strike on the bus was a “deliberate attack on civilians.”
“The Russians could not have failed to understand what kind of vehicle they were targeting,” he said in a statement.
The Russian military did not have any immediate comment on the attack.
In his statement, Mr. Zelensky said he believed that the only way the Kremlin would make peace is if President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia were forced to do so.
“We are expecting strong sanctions against Russia from the United States, from Europe, and from all our partners,” Mr. Zelensky said.
The European Union is set to push through a new raft of sanctions on Tuesday but President Trump has not said if the United States would do the same.
On Friday night, Mr. Trump told Fox News that he believes he can personally broker an end to the fighting by sitting down with Mr. Putin.
“I think Putin is tired of this whole thing,” he said. “This is turkey time. This is now we are talking turkey.”
Military analysts and critics of the Trump administration’s policy, including Republicans, have said that pressuring Ukraine while taking no action against Russia was always doomed to failure.
“I not believe there is any prospect for the end to the war this year,” Mick Ryan, a retired Australian general and fellow at the Lowy Institute, a Sydney-based research group, said in an interview. “Russia has maintained, and doubled down, on its maximalist goals, reinforcing them in negotiations in Turkey this week.”
The focus on territorial gains and demands, which is mainly what the White House has been focused on, misses the point, he said.
“Mr. Putin’s primary goal is snuffing out Ukraine’s democracy and culture, denying it agency in its own affairs,” he said.
Serhii, a 44-year-old volunteer in Sumy who on Saturday helped rescue people injured in the bus attack, said he felt betrayed by the Trump administration’s diplomatic efforts. Asking that his family name not be used out of concern for their safety, he said, “Everything Trump is doing — or not doing — leads to more destruction, the collapse of peace.”
The bus was struck by a Russian Lancet drone outside of Bilopillia, a few miles from the Russian border, which had a prewar population of roughly 15,000 people.
While it has been subject to bombardments for months, those attacks have increased in recent days, local residents said.
The Russians are dropping aerial bombs that can weigh thousands of pounds on the town night and day, a local resident, Yevgen, said when reached by phone. He also asked that his family name not be used out of concern for their safety.
“The town is being completely destroyed,” he said. “You can’t drive by car there anymore — everything is tracked by drones, and they strike at anything that moves.”
The drone that struck the civilian bus at 6:17 a.m. local time is known as a Lancet, a precision weapon that Russia has used to devastating effect throughout the war, Ukrainian officials said. They said it was guided to its target by another surveillance drone, now standard practice.
The Russians tried and failed to seize the city of Sumy in the early months of the war.
Ukraine launched a cross-border offensive into the neighboring Kursk region last summer, seizing hundreds of square miles of Russian territory and hoping to create a buffer zone to protect the city of Sumy from renewed assault. But by March the Russians had largely driven the Ukrainians from Kursk and stepped up their bombardments aimed at Sumy and the surrounding region.
Oleksandr Меrezkho, the chairman of the Ukrainian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said Saturday’s bloodshed was further evidence of a failed American policy.
He pointed out that Mr. Trump had demanded an immediate, unconditional cease-fire for 30 days, which Mr. Zelensky accepted even though Kyiv had long insisted that security guarantees precede any truce. He then called on Mr. Zelensky to take up Mr. Putin’s offer to restart direct negotiations in Istanbul, but then undercut those talks, saying that only he and Mr. Putin together could resolve the war. “Such inconsistency, illogical steps and lack of strategy undermine U.S. credibility and encourage Putin to continue to insist on his maximalist demands,” he said. “Putin has outmaneuvered Trump.”
