Kramatorsk: a Russian air strike destroys the city hall, “they will not deprive us of our right to a future”

A Russian air strike destroyed the building of the city council’s executive committee in Kramatorsk, on Peace Square, on the evening of Saturday, October 31. The news was given by the head of the city’s military administration, Oleksandr Khontsarenko, who described the city hall as “the central building of Ukrainian statehood” in the city.

“One can have a different opinion about officials and administration staff, but that is precisely our freedom and our identity,” Khontsarenko wrote. He said the building withstood 2014, the assaults and the liberation of the city, and that the history of Kramatorsk, a city with an engineering tradition, was written there. “They can destroy a building, burn our land and steal our memories, but they will not deprive us of our right to a future,” he concluded.

Pressure on the Donetsk region

Kramatorsk lies close to the front line and is hit almost daily. The city had recorded 22 attacks in two days in late October, with four people injured, including a strike on an apartment block and an FPV drone attack that wounded a man. By the morning of October 31 the regional administration had recorded two injured and damage to two homes and a car in the city over the previous 24 hours. In neighbouring Sloviansk, two people were killed and 12 injured in the same period.

For Saturday, the head of the Donetsk regional military administration, Vadym Filashkin, reported one dead in Sloviansk and eight injured across the region. The toll excludes Mariupol and Volnovakha.

In its morning update of November 1, the Ukrainian General Staff recorded for the previous 24 hours 264 clashes along the front. Russian forces carried out 74 air strikes with 230 guided bombs, used 6,505 kamikaze drones and shelled settlements and Ukrainian positions 2,533 times. For the Kramatorsk sector, the General Staff said Ukrainian units stopped two Russian attempts to advance near Tykhonivka and Malynivka.

Kramatorsk has suffered a deadly strike before: the attack on its railway station in April 2022. Meanwhile, Russian strikes left 200,000 families in Dnipro without power.