On the night of 5 September 2026, Russian forces launched a ballistic strike on the Kametstal metallurgical plant in Kamianske (Dnipropetrovsk Oblast). According to data confirmed by several media outlets and the company itself, five people were killed in the attack, and several more workers sustained injuries of varying severity. The enterprise has fully halted its production processes, and emergency recovery operations are ongoing on its territory.
Course of the attack and casualties
Among the dead are four Kametstal workers and one employee of a contractor company. Four more employees were injured and are under medical observation. According to available information, only a few minutes passed between the air raid alert and the strike, meaning that not everyone on the plant's territory had time to reach the shelters. The brevity of this time window, according to eyewitnesses and management, determined the number of casualties.
Official position of Metinvest
Alexander Myronenko, the operational director of the Metinvest group, stated that there were no military targets, military equipment, or military production on the Kametstal site: "Only civilian people were working here." The company emphasizes the civilian nature of the facility and classifies the attack as a strike on peaceful infrastructure where civilian specialists were working.
Scale of destruction and recovery
The strike damaged the sintering production, as well as the plant's energy and transport infrastructure. Emergency recovery work is currently underway at the site. Once the rubble is cleared, specialists will have to assess the scale of damage to the equipment and infrastructure; the timeline for resuming and restarting production is currently unknown.
Contradictory data
Open sources show discrepancies in the number of injured. The statement released through Metinvest and some reports cite four injured, whereas the media outlet Meduza, in a headline dated 5 September, refers to five injured. Thus, the exact number of injured remains unconfirmed at the time of publication. In addition, a number of sources (in particular, kp.ru) link the strikes on metallurgical enterprises to Dnipro and speak of the loss of "a third of steel production," which does not match the geography and details of the strike on Kamianske described in the primary reports on Kametstal.
Context: a series of strikes on metallurgy and a day of mourning
5 September was declared a day of mourning in Kamianske for those killed in the attack; flags have been lowered at the Metinvest group's enterprises. The strike on Kametstal continued a series of attacks on the group's metallurgical assets: earlier, Russia struck the Zaporizhstal plant, and the company noted that the facility had not experienced such destruction since World War II. The totality of these events indicates the deliberate nature of the strikes on the civilian metallurgical sector.
