Russian ballistic missile strike hits Kyiv as four killed in Ukrainian cities

The Ukrainian capital came under ballistic missile attack in the early hours of Sunday, with explosions rocking Kyiv as Russian forces launched a sustained assault that also killed four people in other regions later in the day, in what President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned as deliberate terror with no military justification. The Ukrainian Air Force reported that Russia had deployed seven ballistic missiles and 136 drones against targets across the country overnight, with Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko confirming that a blaze had broken out on the seventh and eighth floors of a multi-storey apartment block in a central district following the strike, leaving three people wounded in the capital. Unofficial social media channels showed footage of fires burning in the aftermath, while President Zelensky, who had warned on Friday that Russian attacks were likely over the following 48 hours, reiterated his condemnation of what he described as a deliberate campaign of terror. The attacks came as both sides continued to deny targeting civilians, despite mounting evidence of widespread destruction and civilian casualties since Russia's full-scale invasion began in February 2022.

In the northern city of Chernihiv, local authorities confirmed that a Russian drone had struck a supermarket, killing two people, including a 10-year-old child, and wounding three others, an attack that drew particular outrage given the presence of civilians in a commercial area during the daytime. The eastern city of Kharkiv was also hit by a drone attack that claimed the life of one person and left 12 others requiring medical attention, while a glide bomb attack on the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, which has endured heavy bombardment in recent months, killed one more person and wounded six others. Across Ukraine, the cumulative toll from the day's attacks stood at four civilians killed, a figure that underscored the ongoing vulnerability of urban centres to Russian aerial bombardment despite the deployment of Western-supplied air defence systems. In Moscow's account of the conflict, Russian-installed officials in occupied territories reported that four civilians had been killed in a Ukrainian drone strike in the city of Horlivka, located in the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine's Donetsk region, though no further details were provided by Mayor Ivan Prikhodko, who announced the casualties via TASS. The claims and counter-claims regarding civilian casualties have become a recurring feature of the conflict, with both sides accusing the other of deliberately attacking non-combatants, though the overwhelming majority of civilian deaths have occurred on the Ukrainian side. On Saturday, Russian-installed authorities had accused Ukraine of deliberately targeting civilians after 12 people were killed in a drone attack on a holiday camp in the Russian-held part of the Zaporizhzhia region, an allegation that Kyiv has firmly denied.