At least one person was killed and several others were injured on Sunday after Russian drone strikes on a pharmaceutical plant in Ukraine's Sumy, which belongs to the Indian firm Kusum Group.
Visuals from the site of the morning drone attacks show the main building of the pharma plant sustained heavy damage, with the number of casualties expected to increase.
Thick plumes of smoke were also seen billowing from the building right after the drone strikes.
The morning airstrikes came after an overnight barrage of 135 attack drones on Ukraine, of which at least 50 were jet-powered.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the Sunday attacks, saying that it was not just the warehouse that had been targeted, but also Kyiv's Pivnichnyi Bridge and a communications facility in Dnipro. Other parts of the war-torn country that sustained damage were Kharkiv, Donetsk, Sumy, and Zaporizhzhia.
"Among the main targets of these terrorists, as always, are ordinary residential buildings, critical infrastructure—everything that makes up normal everyday life ... Our services are working at the impact sites," he wrote in an X post, condoling the deaths.
On the Indian-owned pharma plant
Founded in India in 1994, the Kusum Group started out as a distributor exporting Indian medicines to Ukraine, after which it revamped operations, marketing its own brands and opening pharma plants—first in India in 2007, and two years later, in Sumy in 2009, followed by more in India.
This Sumy plant continued to operate throughout the years—including war years that began from 2022—but has now been badly hit. An NDTV report estimates the loss at ₹400 crore.
Notably, this is not the first time that the Indian-origin company's operations have been hit either.
In April 2025, a Russian drone attack destroyed a warehouse in Kyiv that belonged to Kusum's Ukrainian unit Gledpharm, which incurred losses of about UAH 1 billion (roughly $24 million).
"While claiming 'special friendship' with India, Moscow deliberately targets Indian businesses—destroying medicines meant for children and the elderly," the Ukrainian Embassy in Delhi had said at the time.
