Komyshuvakha aid hub toll reaches 31 with 48 missing, as Russia follows with overnight barrage on Ukrainian power grid and a Kharkiv hospital

The death toll from Monday's Russian bombing of an aid distribution site in Komyshuvakha, in Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia region, has risen to at least 31. Mykhailo Semikin, the acting head of the regional military administration, said Tuesday that 48 people are still considered missing.

The dead include four police officers and two rescue workers, Semikin said. At least five people were hurt.

Russian guided bombs hit a school building used to hand out humanitarian packages, then struck a nearby shelter. Semikin said rescue efforts Monday evening were hampered when Russian drones attacked the same area again. Emergency crews kept searching the collapsed buildings by torchlight after dark, according to photos and video posted by local officials.

A second wave overnight

Russia then hit the country with a much larger barrage overnight into Tuesday, Nov. 3. Zelenskyy said Russia launched 289 attack drones, 17 ballistic missiles and 59 cruise missiles across nine regions.

Ukraine's Air Force said its defenses shot down or electronically suppressed 309 aerial targets, including 49 cruise missiles and 257 drones. Ukrainian officials said strategic bombers and jet-powered Shahed-type drones were used.

Zelenskyy said the main target was energy: power generation and substations in the Odesa, Cherkasy, Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Chernivtsi, Chernihiv and Rivne regions. He called it a "complex, massive attack."

This matches the warning he gave in his Nov. 2 evening address, when he said Ukrainian intelligence pointed to a strike on energy and logistics timed to the U.S. midterms.

Kharkiv hospital and the grid

Zelenskyy said Russia "directly struck a city clinical hospital" in Kharkiv, injuring 73 people and damaging the cardiology department. Mayor Ihor Terekhov said more than 1,000 windows were shattered in the medical facility and nearby apartment buildings.

Oleh Syniehubov, head of the Kharkiv regional military administration, said earlier that at least 62 people were wounded across the region in the combined missile and drone attack, and that more than 200 patients were moved to other facilities. Ukrainian outlets put the number of evacuated patients at 226. The casualty count rose to 73 in updated figures from regional authorities.

In Dnipro, Mayor Borys Filatov said a thermal power plant in the Samarskyi district was hit, along with a residential area and a police station. A hospital elsewhere in the city was damaged, and so was a hospice for elderly and terminally ill patients. Ukrainian outlets report one person killed and 15 injured in Dnipro. Regional authorities counted about 100 injured across four oblasts.

Grid operator Ukrenergo reported emergency power cuts in Kyiv, the Kyiv region and the Dnipropetrovsk region. Zhytomyr Governor Vitalii Bunechko said more than 180,000 people there were without power Tuesday morning. Odesa has put scheduled outages in place.

The Russian Ministry of Defence said it targeted electricity facilities in the Vinnytsia, Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv regions. It said those sites supplied power to the Ukrainian army and military factories. Its statement did not address the hospital.

Ukraine is hitting back. Yaroslavl Governor Mikhail Yevrayev said a Ukrainian drone attack started a fire at an oil refinery there and injured two employees.

Midterms and the diplomatic track

Zelenskyy said Moscow was counting on Washington not to notice. "The Russians think America won't notice this signal of theirs," he said. "We need to help Ukraine defend its skies; otherwise, Russia will never stop its missile strikes." He also said it was "very telling that all this is happening on the day of the U.S. congressional elections."

He argued the Komyshuvakha attack showed Moscow wanted to kill people rather than build on the roughly week-long ceasefire around Oleshky, brokered by First Lady Melania Trump. A day earlier, Zelenskyy said Kyiv had proposed more humanitarian steps after Oleshky and that Russia "continues to kill people."

He has also asked for faster Patriot deliveries. In a Nov. 1 post on X he said new U.S. and European aid packages "cannot take years," because "Russia is destroying infrastructure and killing our people right now."

Al Jazeera's Audrey MacAlpine, reporting from Kyiv, said there have been no significant U.S. military aid packages for Ukraine since the Trump administration took office. She compared that with roughly $60 billion in military aid during the early years of the Biden administration.

The White House is pursuing a diplomatic track. U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff said late Monday that U.S., Russian and Ukrainian officials will meet in Abu Dhabi next week. He said the talks would cover "post-war security arrangements, de-escalation, humanitarian efforts, and next steps toward peace."

Witkoff added that U.S. negotiators will meet representatives of France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the European Union and NATO in Brussels this week on security guarantees and reconstruction.

Still unresolved: the 48 people missing under the rubble in Komyshuvakha. That figure will determine how high the toll goes before the Abu Dhabi delegations sit down.