Russia kills at least 16 in strikes on Kyiv, other cities

Russia flattened a section of an apartment block in Kyiv on Tuesday in its deadliest attack on the Ukrainian capital this year, part of a huge barrage of hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles that killed at least 16 people and wounded 124 others.

Ukrainian officials declared a day of mourning on Wednesday for the victims of what President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described as one of the most horrific attacks on the capital since the start of the war.

Zelenskyy said the Russian forces had sent 440 drones and fired 32 missiles at Ukraine.

Russia's defence ministry said it had used air, land and sea-based missiles and drones to strike "objects of the military-industrial complex of Ukraine" in the Kyiv region and southern Zaporizhzhia province.

Ukrainian officials said about 27 locations in the capital were hit during several waves of attacks throughout the night, that damaged residential buildings, educational institutions and critical infrastructure.

A missile struck a nine-storey residential building in Kyiv's Solomianskyi district, wiping out a whole section of it, which was flattened into a pile of debris.

Emergency workers were combing through the rubble and dousing the flames with hoses. They used a crane to lower a wounded elderly woman in a stretcher out of the window of a flat in an adjacent section of the building.

Reuters witnesses said drones swarmed over the capital and they heard what appeared to be missiles overhead. An air raid alert remained in effect more than seven hours after it had been proclaimed.

Kyiv police said that 15 people were killed and 124 were injured in the attack. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said the dead in the capital included a 62-year-old US citizen, who died from shrapnel wounds.

Russia's full-scale invasion is now in its fourth year, and the hostilities have heated up in recent weeks as Kyiv and Moscow failed to reach any agreement during two rounds of peace talks in Istanbul.

Russian troops are pressing on with a grinding advance in eastern Ukraine and have opened a new front in the Sumy region in the northeast, despite calls for a ceasefire from US President Donald Trump, who promised to end the war quickly.

Zelenskyy is currently attending a summit of the Group of Seven nations in Canada to garner more support for tighter sanctions on Russia and continued military aid for Ukraine. He had hoped to meet Trump, but Trump left the summit a day early, with the White House citing the situation in the Middle East.

Trump has reoriented US policy away from supporting Kyiv towards accepting Moscow's justifications for its invasion, and has so far resisted calls from European allies to impose tighter sanctions on Moscow for rejecting his calls for a ceasefire.

At the summit, Trump called for the G7 to readmit Russia, which was expelled from the group in 2014 after an earlier attack on Ukraine.

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