Russian forces have bombed an aid centre in Ukraine, killing at least 31 people, according to Ukrainian officials, as the United States announced plans for new peace talks on November 10 and 11.

The aid centre, at a school in the village of Komyshuvakha in the Zaporizhzhia region, had been closed to students because the village sits too close to the front line, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Monday. Instead, it served as a shelter and as a weekly distribution point for aid packages, which residents who remain in the village collected every Monday.

“The Russians struck first just as people were arriving – a few aerial bombs,” he said in his nightly address. “Then there was a second strike – more air bombs, this time on the shelter. A vile terrorist strike.”

Zelenskyy said the Russians could not have been unaware that residents remaining in Komyshuvakha gathered each week to pick up humanitarian packages.

Among the dead were two members of a rescue crew and four police officers, according to Ukraine’s emergency services. Five people, including two rescue workers, were being treated in hospitals.

Photographs posted online showed smouldering debris scattered across the area.

Warnings of new ‘massive attack’

There was no immediate comment from Russia.

Zelenskyy said the attack was “further proof that Russia does not want any kind of de-escalation, any real justice.”

He argued that Moscow had squandered an opening created by a humanitarian mission last week in Oleshky, a Russian-occupied southern city, which was brokered by US First Lady Melania Trump.

“If Russia genuinely wanted de-escalation, there was an opportunity following the situation in Oleshky to continue taking humanitarian steps,” he said. “We proposed this. But Russia continues to kill people.”

Zelenskyy also said Ukrainian intelligence had warned that Russia was preparing a new “massive attack” on the country’s energy and logistics networks, timed to coincide with the US midterm elections on Tuesday.

Writing on X, he said Moscow was counting on the world’s attention being elsewhere, allowing Ukraine’s struggles with air defences and Patriot missiles to go unnoticed.

He urged Washington to pressure Russia “in such a way that it has no alternative but to end this war”.

Talks in Abu Dhabi

Hours after the attack, US special envoy Steve Witkoff said that delegations from Ukraine and Russia would meet in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, on November 10 and 11.

In a social media post, Witkoff said the talks would address “post-war security agreements, de-escalation, humanitarian measures, and ending the war”.

Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to the new round of three-way talks after meeting Witkoff in St Petersburg on October 21.

The talks come as US negotiators seek a breakthrough before winter in the war, now in its fifth year.

The last US-mediated talks were held in February, before the US and Israel launched their war on Iran.

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, cited Monday’s attack in urging countries to oppose Russia’s return to elite international sport, after the Court of Arbitration for Sport ordered that Russia be reinstated in major ice hockey tournaments.

“Russia deserves condemnation, isolation, and consequences, not a return to international respectability,” Sybiha wrote on X.

Elsewhere in Ukraine on Monday, drone strikes injured 12 people in the eastern Kharkiv region, damaging a refrigeration facility, greenhouses and homes, according to emergency services. In the Black Sea port of Odesa, five people were injured when a warehouse was hit and nearby houses were damaged.

Russia’s Ministry of Defence said its forces had shot down 212 Ukrainian drones overnight. The governor of Russia’s Samara region, Vyacheslav Fedorishchev, said air defences had repelled an attack there but gave no further details.