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Drones, missiles and retaliation threats in early January
Summary
A look back at the security picture around 6 January 2025, when a bus in Kherson was hit and Moscow vowed to retaliate over ATACMS launches.
What did the first week of 2025 show about the shape of the war? On 6 January 2025, a Russian drone struck a civilian passenger bus in Kherson, reportedly killing at least one person and injuring at least nine others.
The attack fell within a long pattern for the city. Throughout the Russian invasion, Kherson has been shelled repeatedly, and those attacks intensified after the city was liberated.
Claims and threats from 4 January
Two days before the bus strike, on 4 January 2025, the Russian Armed Forces claimed to have shot down eight American ATACMS missiles fired by Ukraine. They also vowed retaliation. That was a claim by the Russian military; the reported outcome of any such response is not part of this account.
The same day, a war correspondent for the Russian newspaper Izvestia was killed in a Ukrainian drone strike in Donetsk Oblast. The region belongs to Ukraine's easternmost theatre of operations, alongside Luhansk and Kharkiv, which has seen fighting since the start of the war in February 2022.
What the sequence shows
Taken together, the reports from 4 to 6 January describe drones in use on both sides of the front line. A Ukrainian drone strike killed a journalist in the east. A Russian drone struck a civilian vehicle in the south. Long-range Western-supplied missiles also featured in the exchange, with Moscow claiming to have intercepted them and promising a response.
The Kherson incident was categorised among attacks on civilians in the invasion, while the Donetsk Oblast death was recorded among journalists killed during the war. The pairing of a civilian casualty event and a media casualty event within days underlines how widely the war's risks fell, from passengers on a city bus to correspondents near the front.
The retaliation vow of 4 January was a statement of intent rather than a described action. What can be said for 6 January is narrower: a drone hit a bus in Kherson, with at least one person reported dead and at least nine hurt.
