On 2 November, Russian forces struck a school in Komyshuvakha, Zaporizhzhia Oblast, that local residents used to pick up humanitarian relief, killing 26, according to Ukraine's State Emergency Service. The strike was divided into two attacks. After the first blast, they dropped nine more guided bombs on the shelter where people had fled, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.

The second blast is the signature of a tactic Ukrainian prosecutors have documented across the war, the “double-tap” strike timed to kill rescuers and neighbors who rush to the wounded. The strike on Komyshuvakha killed 26 people.

It landed days after a rare Ukraine-Russia truce let civilians out of Russian-occupied Oleshky, a contrast Zelenskyy seized on to argue that Moscow has no intention of easing its war.

A strike on a site everyone knew handed out aid

The school housed one of the region’s “resilience centers", where residents who have stayed near the front line received the aid. Zelenskyy described the sequence plainly in his evening address.

“After the first strike of aerial bombs, there was a repeat strike of nine more bombs, and precisely on the shelter where people were," he explained.

Many of those killed and wounded were civilians who had come for aid or hurried back to help after the first bomb fell. The Russians could not have failed to know what the site was, Zelenskyy said, because local people had been receiving aid there every week.

A rising toll, and a pointed contrast with Oleshky

As of the evening of 2 November, 27 people were still unaccounted for beneath the rubble, Zelenskyy and regional officials said, and the toll was expected to climb.

Zelenskyy tied the attack to the humanitarian mission that days earlier had brought civilians out of Russian-occupied Oleshky under the longest ceasefire of the war.

If Russia genuinely wanted to wind down the fighting, he argued, the days after Oleshky were the moment to show it, and Ukraine had proposed further steps, but Russia keeps killing.