Russian drone strike kills three in Ukraine, including children injured

A Russian drone strike killed two passengers in a civilian minibus in Nikopol, in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, and another man in Sumy, bringing the day’s death toll to three and leaving children among the wounded. The attacks hit two different regions on Friday, June 26, and showed how Russian drones are reaching ordinary roads and villages far from the main front.

In Nikopol, governor Oleksandr Hanzha said 12 people were injured, including two children. Later coverage put the number of wounded at 13. The strike hit a minibus traveling on the road into the city, turning a routine trip into a lethal scene for passengers who were inside a civilian vehicle. Nikopol sits on the opposite bank of the Dnipro River from the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, a location that has made the city a repeated target throughout the war.

That geography has carried nuclear-risk consequences as well. A June 2026 report said a drone strike on a Nikopol substation briefly cut external power to the plant, underscoring how attacks in the area can reach beyond local casualties and disrupt critical infrastructure tied to Europe’s largest nuclear facility. Nikopol has endured years of shelling and drone attacks, and the latest strike again hit a place where daily movement, not military activity, was at the center of the damage.

In Sumy region, governor Oleh Hryhorov said a drone killed a man in a village outside the regional center. Follow-up reporting identified the site as the Verkhnia Syrovatka hromada and the victim as a 66-year-old man killed in an outbuilding on private property. The strike added to the pressure on a border region that has faced near-constant Russian attack, as Russian forces step up strikes along Ukraine’s northeastern frontier and push toward Sumy.

Taken together, the strikes showed the broad reach of Russia’s drone campaign on a single day: a minibus on a city road, a household in a rural community, and civilians moving through places that had no visible link to the battlefield. For residents in Dnipropetrovsk and Sumy, the danger now lies not only in whether their area is under attack, but in how often ordinary travel, work and family life can be interrupted without warning.