Home › Security › Drone strike on Kherson bus, and ATACMS claims
Drone strike on Kherson bus, and ATACMS claims
Summary
A look back at 6 January 2025, when a Russian drone hit a civilian bus in Kherson, and at the preceding two days of strikes and claims.
What did the war look like on 6 January 2025? It was marked by a drone attack on a civilian passenger bus in Kherson, in southern Ukraine, which reportedly killed at least one person and injured at least nine others.
Kherson had been shelled repeatedly throughout the Russian invasion, and the attacks on the city intensified after its liberation. The bus strike was one more incident in that pattern of attacks on civilians.
Claims and counter-strikes in the days before
The attack followed two days in which both sides reported strikes of their own. On 4 January 2025, the Russian Armed Forces claimed to have shot down eight American ATACMS missiles fired by Ukraine, and vowed retaliation. No outcome of that vow was reported in the material available for 6 January.
On the same day, 4 January 2025, a war correspondent for the Russian newspaper Izvestia was killed in a Ukrainian drone strike in Donetsk Oblast. Donetsk, together with Luhansk and Kharkiv, has been part of the eastern theatre of operations since the war began in February 2022.
A war fought with drones on both sides
Taken together, the reports from 4 to 6 January 2025 show drones in use on both sides: a Ukrainian strike that killed a journalist in the east, and a Russian strike that hit a bus carrying civilians in the south. They also show missile fire in the news, with Russia asserting that it had intercepted eight ATACMS and promising a response.
The Kherson casualty figures were given as minimums, at least one dead and at least nine injured, as reported at the time.
