Footage exclusively obtained from Ukrainian authorities and analyzed by CNN reveals new details of how Russia struck an underground shelter in southeastern Ukraine with a massive bunker-busting bomb.
The November 2 attack on a village in southern Ukraine killed more than 50 people, becoming the deadliest Russian strike on Ukraine in 2026 and among the deadliest of the war. Those killed had gathered to receive food and aid – and many of them had taken cover after an earlier strike.
CNN’s review of police bodycam footage, weapon fragments, eyewitness testimony and geolocated videos shows that the bombing was part of a “double tap” attack – a military tactic in which a second strike is carried out soon after an initial attack.
The second strike came after emergency workers had arrived to respond to the first airstrike and villagers had sought shelter in the underground school, which had been converted into a community center.
The day before the strike, the Komyshuvakha village council announced in two Telegram posts that residents could collect bread and hygiene kits at the school between 10 a.m. and noon the next day.
Barely 10 miles from the front line, the school had become a lifeline for the few hundred villagers who remained in Komyshuvakha: an aid distribution point, a medical and social services hub, and a place to sleep.
Aid collection turns into a rescue operation
Between 9:45 and 9:50 a.m. local time on November 2, two bombs hit the school grounds, authorities told CNN. Preliminary reports indicated that one woman was killed and another was trapped beneath a concrete slab, alive but injured.
No footage of the first strike was available, but Ukraine’s interior ministry and national police gave CNN exclusive access to timestamped bodycam footage from local police officers Mykhailo Romanov and Dmytro Besedin. CNN watched the footage over Zoom with a representative from Ukraine’s interior ministry. Together, the recordings offer the clearest insight so far into how the attack unfolded. CNN could not publish most of the footage because of police concerns for the victims’ families, though police posted a short, edited clip from Romanov’s bodycam online.
Besedin’s bodycam footage begins at 10:15 a.m. Buildings are heavily damaged, and rubble covers the ground. Rescuers are digging through the debris to reach the woman trapped beneath the concrete slab. A fire truck stands in the courtyard, still intact.
Fourteen minutes later, Romanov’s bodycam shows elderly residents gathered outside. A bicycle’s full basket suggests some had already collected aid. One man tells a police officer he is ready to evacuate the village. At 10:32 a.m., a warning comes over Romanov’s police radio: another airstrike is headed their way.
Rescuers face a choice: keep trying to save the woman beneath the slab or seek shelter underground. Seconds later, another warning tells residents to take cover. Both officers join locals at the bunker entrance and descend three flights of stairs into the underground school, where aid has been distributed. They sit in a room used by local police.
A second strike hits the shelter
At 10:35 a.m., both bodycams capture the sound of a blast. An orange flash fills the screens before the images fade to black. Romanov and Besedin, both community police officers for more than a decade, were killed along with two other officers, according to Ukrainian police. The recordings capture their final moments and the sounds of people in the room groaning.
The bunker collapsed after the explosion, Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence service said in a statement. Six more airstrikes hit the site shortly afterward, the service said.
CNN reviewed dozens of videos to reconstruct the attack and independently corroborated accounts of multiple waves of strikes. Bodycam footage shows a yellow building serving as an entrance to the underground school apparently undamaged after the initial strike, despite destruction nearby. Video filmed after the bunker strike shows the same building heavily pockmarked.
Trevor Ball, a weapons technical analyst at Armament Research Services who reviewed footage for CNN, said damage to nearby buildings visible before the second strike could have been caused by smaller Russian bombs, such as the FAB-500.
The bodycam footage also documents the “double tap”: a second strike after responders arrived. Two first responders were killed in Komyshuvakha, according to officials.
Evidence points to a massive glide bomb
Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence service identified the bomb that directly hit the bunker as a FAB-3000. The weapon weighs more than 6,000 pounds and carries more than 3,000 pounds of explosives. Russia has modernized these weapons by fitting them with guidance kits, turning “dumb bombs” into precision-guided glide bombs. The FAB-3000 is designed to target fortified underground structures such as bunkers.
Videos filmed after the attack show widespread devastation and a huge crater that CNN geolocated between the bunker’s two entrances. Smoke continued to billow from the crater hours later. Footage that appears to show the blast’s epicenter reveals a path through multiple layers of concrete into the bunker.
CNN exclusively obtained images and video from Ukraine’s Security Service, the SBU, showing a bomb disposal team collecting munition fragments after the strike. According to the SBU video, the crater measures approximately 30 meters by 20 meters (98 feet by 67 feet). CNN could not independently measure it because satellite imagery was unavailable. Two munitions experts who reviewed the footage said the crater’s size and the damage were consistent with a 6,000-pound bomb such as a FAB-3000.
Explosive munitions expert Chris Cobb-Smith and Ball reviewed the SBU imagery. Among the metal fragments, they identified the wing of a Russian UMPK glide bomb guidance kit consistent with those attached to FAB-3000s. CNN separately confirmed that the fragment matched online photographs of such kits.
Danielle Bell, head of the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, condemned the attack, noting that “the timing and location of the humanitarian distribution was well publicized.”
“Either the Russian armed forces knew that there was a humanitarian distribution taking place, or they failed to take the most basic steps to find out what was happening in this village they were planning to attack. In either case, this attack seems to have violated the most fundamental principles of international humanitarian law,” Bell said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky linked the attack to the US midterm elections. “It is very telling that all of this is happening on the day of the US congressional elections. The Russians believe that America will not notice this signal from them. But such terror must be noticed and stopped,” he said.
Russia, which consistently denies targeting civilians, has not commented on the strike itself. In a statement to state media, the Russian Defense Ministry said it had attacked Ukrainian military units in the area that day.
Rescuers face further attacks
Volunteer first responder Vladyslav Makhovsky arrived within hours of the strikes and shared several videos with CNN. They show the fire truck destroyed and mangled bicycles among the rubble, apparently left by people who had come to collect aid. One video shows a victim receiving CPR; another shows people carrying away the bodies of those killed.
“Everything was burned; even the rescue workers’ car was on fire, and the area around it looked like it had been hit by a tornado – everything was destroyed. People were screaming; some were being pulled out. There was a woman there – her arm had been torn off and she was badly injured,” Makhovsky told CNN.
Smoke was coming from the entrance to the underground school, Makhovsky said. Rescuers were trying to go inside with breathing apparatus.
“There was a huge crater right where the school stood, and you could see the floor slabs… it was clear that the crater and its epicenter were right on top of the underground school,” the volunteer first responder added. He told CNN that Russian drones swarmed the sky for days afterward, disrupting rescue and recovery efforts.
On November 8, a drone again targeted those working at the school, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said in a statement. No one was injured, but rescue equipment was damaged, the service said.
From school to humanitarian hub
Built with EU funding, the underground school replaced a school destroyed in a Russian airstrike in July 2023. It opened in October 2025. Video from the school showed colorful classrooms and a room lined with beds where young children could rest.
The school was intended to keep children learning despite the war. Within months, however, near-constant shelling forced children to evacuate the village, and the school closed. Local authorities converted it into an administrative center and humanitarian hub for residents who stayed, either by choice or because they could not leave. Makhovsky told CNN that, to his knowledge, the site had never served a military purpose.
In footage reviewed by CNN from before and after the strikes, no military infrastructure was visible, though authorities confirmed that a military commander and a military paramedic were killed at the site. The spokesperson for Ukraine’s Southern Group of Forces told CNN that the commander, Major Vitalii Bevz, arrived at the aid distribution point “after the first explosions and was killed during the repeat strikes.”
Oleksandr Zalishchuk, the military paramedic, was at the scene by chance and began helping civilians, according to a statement from his brigade.
The site had already come under attack that year. In June, local media reported that five Russian first-person-view (FPV) drones had attacked construction workers distributing building materials to residents whose homes had been damaged by shelling.
Komyshuvakha is one of many Ukrainian frontline villages left desolate by fighting. Many buildings had already been damaged by shelling, and most of its pre-war population of around 5,000 had left.
Around 200 mostly elderly residents remained, entirely reliant on aid deliveries. The few remaining police officers and volunteers such as Makhovsky carried rifles to shoot down FPV drones, a near-constant threat.
In 2023, this part of the southern front was the focus of Ukraine’s failed counteroffensive, which sought to cut Russia’s land bridge from Crimea to the Donbas. Russia made small advances in the following years but repeatedly failed to take Orikhiv, a critical stronghold less than 20 miles to the south.
On November 9, rescuers were still digging through rubble in Komyshuvakha, searching for around 19 people authorities believed were trapped beneath the wreckage. Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence service said DNA samples had been collected from relatives of the missing to help identify recovered bodies.
Romanov and Besedin were buried Saturday alongside the two other police officers killed in the attack, Mykhailo Buzhenko and Mykola Balanda. Their final moments, captured on their bodycams, are now key evidence in the SBU’s investigation into how a shelter built to keep civilians safe became a mass grave.
CNN’s Oscar Featherstone and Ivana Kottasová contributed to this report.
