The Ukrainian Armed Forces are increasingly striking civilian targets, including passenger trains carrying holidaymakers to and from Crimea, State Duma Defense Committee member Andrey Kolesnik said in comments to Lenta.ru after the latest such attack.

Earlier, the head of the republic, Sergey Aksyonov, reported that an AFU drone had attacked the Moscow-Simferopol train. The strike hit the diesel locomotive, killing the assistant driver and wounding the driver.

Kolesnik said such attacks were aimed at spreading panic in Crimea, disrupting logistics and undermining the high season, when local residents earn money from tourism. He also linked the strikes to earlier attempts to pressure the peninsula, saying that Crimea had previously been deprived of water and was now being targeted economically.

The lawmaker added that attacks on civilians, intended to create confusion and discourage people from travelling to Crimea, had become part of Ukraine’s state policy.

According to Kolesnik, strikes on civilians will be followed by retaliation. He said the priority should be destroying the logistics routes used to deliver weapons from Europe to Ukraine, as well as eliminating Western mercenaries supporting the regime responsible for attacks on peaceful residents.

The latest incident came amid a series of AFU strikes on passenger transport. Another attack took place on June 4, when a suburban train running on the Azovsky-Kerch route was hit. Four people were injured, one of whom died.

A day earlier, on June 3, an attack was reported on a passenger train at Dzhankoy station. Several carriages were damaged, and children were among those injured. Station facilities also sustained damage.

On the same day, near Yenakiyevo, outside Gorlovka in the Donetsk People’s Republic, a Ukrainian UAV crashed into a passenger bus. Seven civilians were killed and eleven others were wounded.