KYIV — A Russian jet-powered drone hit a platform at Dnipro's main railway station on Thursday morning, killing at least 14 people as a commuter train stood waiting to leave for Zaporizhzhia, the state rail operator Ukrzaliznytsia and regional officials said.

Oleksandr Hanzha, who heads the Dnipropetrovsk regional administration, said on Telegram that the toll had reached 14 by early afternoon and that 14 other people were wounded. Six were in a serious condition, he said, among them an 11-year-old boy and a man who lost both legs.

The station sits on a network that has carried civilians and freight through the war since Russia's 2022 invasion, and that Kyiv counts as a lifeline for the south-east. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy used the strike to press Washington and European capitals for a tougher line on Moscow, after a US-brokered arrangement eased some American sanctions on Russia.

Zelenskyy called the attack horrific and said the drone hit a platform "where a regular commuter train and a regular passenger train were standing". Sanctions "must not be eased for as long as this Russian war continues", he said, and he questioned how many such strikes Russia had carried out against Ukrainians since the measures were lifted. He added that it mattered that the United States did not stay silent about the killings.

Ukrzaliznytsia said an air raid alert was already in force when its monitoring staff flagged the approaching drone and ordered traffic at the station halted. An evacuation was announced on the Zaporizhzhia train more than 10 minutes before the strike, the company said, and the driver's assistant went through each carriage. Passengers were told over the loudspeakers to get at least 200 metres clear.

"Unfortunately, despite all this, many people were in the immediate vicinity of the train at the fatal moment of the strike, hence such a significant number of dead and wounded," Ukrzaliznytsia wrote.

Ukraine's air force said Russia sent four jet-powered drones towards the Dnipropetrovsk region. Three were shot down and the fourth got through. Moscow has come to rely more heavily on jet-powered types, and about six in 10 of the Geran-4 model have been brought down over the past three months.

Images released by Ukraine's emergency service showed bodies on the platform, rescuers helping the wounded, and two burnt-out passenger trains with shattered windows.

Matthias Schmale, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Ukraine, condemned the attack the same day, when the confirmed toll stood at 13 dead and 10 injured. "Civilians preparing for a trip, welcoming or bidding farewell to loved ones faced death and devastation," he said, adding that the images from Dnipro could not become another story that fades from attention.

Figures from the rail operator, cited by the UN, put attacks on Ukrainian railway facilities at 1,206 last year and about 1,700 so far in 2026. By late August, 492 locomotives had been damaged in Russian attacks on the routes Ukraine uses to move exports. A Russian strike hit a passenger train near the Polish border in September. Russia has aimed drones at trains since the first days of the invasion, destroying hundreds of locomotives and killing railway workers.

Russian officials made no public comment on the Dnipro strike. Russian news agencies instead reported the defence ministry as saying its forces had struck a cargo vessel in the Black Sea used by the Ukrainian military. The Kremlin has said it will not slow the overall pace of the war.

Five more people were killed in Russian strikes on two other Ukrainian cities on Thursday. In Chernihiv, an attack on the city centre killed two 15-year-old girls and wounded nearly two dozen people, four of them children, according to Dmytro Bryzhynsky, head of the city's military administration. Three died in Kremenchuk when a drone hit a multi-storey residential building, the local governor said, and a six-year-old was among the wounded. In Kharkiv, Mayor Ihor Terekhov said drones hit the Kholodnohirskyi and Saltivskyi districts and that updated information showed an educational institution had been struck.

Ukraine mounted one of its largest drone operations of the war the same night. TASS reported that 613 drones were launched towards Moscow, and Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said air defences destroyed 231 of them on the approach to the city, with the rest brought down further out. The defence ministry put the national total at 1,214 Ukrainian drones destroyed overnight. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called it "very strange" for Kyiv to target Moscow while the city was hosting more than 22 African leaders at a summit.

French President Emmanuel Macron condemned the Dnipro attack and said what was needed was "far more than a localised ceasefire".

That truce, agreed for six days in Ukraine's Kherson region and brokered by US First Lady Melania Trump, took effect on Tuesday to let aid reach Oleshky, a Russian-held town cut off since 2022. Ukraine's human rights commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, said on Thursday that he was on his way to the town to accompany residents out.

Schmale said 200 to 300 residents might leave, which would still leave more than 1,000 people there in need of support, and that aid deliveries could arrive as early as Friday. The Oleshky ceasefire is due to expire on the evening of November 1. Russian and Ukrainian officials are expected to meet US envoys next month, though no date has been set.