Russia just bombed the rescue workers digging for its own victims
8 hours ago · 8 November 2026Share
UK Energy Secretary Grant Shapps stands by bombed transformers at a Ukrainian power station. File photo. UK Government · CC BY 2.0
Russia just cut power to more than 850,000 people in Ukraine.
And while the lights were going out, rescuers digging for bodies got hit too.
So let's start with the power.
DTEK, Ukraine's biggest private electricity company, says overnight strikes hit major energy sites in the Dnipropetrovsk region. More than 600,000 people there lost power.
In the Kharkiv region, a drone hit a critical infrastructure site in Zlatopil. Nearly 250,000 customers lost power there too.
Mykola Baksheyev is the mayor of Zlatopil. He says nobody knows yet when it'll be fixed.
Now the other attack. This one is worse.
A Russian drone hit the village of Komyshuvakha in the Zaporizhzhia region this morning. It hit the exact spot where rescuers have spent seven days digging through rubble.
What rubble? Six days ago, Russia bombed a former school and underground shelter there. It was being used to hand out humanitarian aid.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine's president, says it was a double-tap. The school was hit first. Then nine more bombs hit the shelter, where people had run to hide.
The death toll has gone up every single day since. 24 the day after. Then 40. Then 42. Then 50. Then 53. Now 55.
Ukraine's military intelligence agency, HUR, says around 50 people are still missing.
So rescuers have been digging through that for a week. And this morning, Russia hit them while they were doing it.
Ukraine's State Emergency Service says nobody was hurt in today's drone strike. But it wrecked specialised rescue equipment.
Zelenskyy says quote "more people may still be under the rubble".
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Contains modified Openstreetmap data showing Ukraine's national transmission grid of electrical power overhead lines in 2022, colour-coded by voltage.HighVoltage 5576 · CC0
So Ukraine's own president is saying the rescue workers were the target. And now the search just got harder, with people still buried.
Oleksandr Kovalenko speaks for the Zaporizhzhia regional military administration. He says rescuers there can often only work 15 to 20 minutes at a time before they have to pull back, because more strikes might be coming.
Today's drone attack shows exactly why.
Russia tells a different story about the first strike, on 2 November. Its defence ministry says it hit Ukrainian military units near Komyshuvakha, not aid workers, and that up to 25 Ukrainian soldiers died along with military equipment.
Russia has not shown any evidence for that. And it has said nothing about today's drone strike on the rescuers.
All of this is landing as temperatures drop towards freezing, at the start of a fourth winter of this war.
And there's more. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which Russia controls, has lost its outside power supply again. It's running on backup diesel generators.
The International Atomic Energy Agency says those generators have enough fuel for about two weeks. Nobody knows yet why the plant lost power this time.
Zelenskyy says Russia is doing all this on purpose, to pressure Ukraine before trilateral talks brokered by the United States, set for 10 and 11 November in Abu Dhabi.
Here's some context on the timing. The Komyshuvakha attack came a day after a six-day ceasefire ended in Oleshky, a Russian-occupied city in the Kherson region.
And the numbers behind this war keep climbing too. Ukraine's General Staff says 381,300 Russian troops were killed or badly wounded between 1 January and 31 October this year. In the week to 6 November alone, Russia fired 2,346 drones and more than 80 missiles at Ukraine.
So what don't we know? Whether the nuclear plant's power loss is connected to the overnight strikes on the grid. How many people are still trapped at Komyshuvakha — estimates range from around 39 to about 50. And whether Russia's claim of 25 dead soldiers is true at all. Nobody outside Moscow has confirmed it.
Right now, DTEK and Ukraine's grid teams are racing to get power back to 850,000 people before the cold really sets in.
And at Komyshuvakha, rescuers are still going back in. 15 minutes at a time. Digging for people Zelenskyy says might still be alive down there.
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