more than four years into the war with talks on ending the conflict stalled. AFP journalists heard loud bangs echoing over the capital during the night and saw huge plumes of black smoke rising over central Kyiv at dawn. More than 100 people were wounded in the attacks that ripped through apartment buildings in the middle of the night.

"The impact happened immediately. I heard screams, and we ran quickly. I tried to jump out of the apartment to save myself," a woman called Tetiana in Odesa, the heaviest hit city, told AFP. Her neighbour Roman, lost his son and daughter-in-law in the barrage. "The ceilings collapsed, we were pinned by furniture. My wife and I tried to get out. She rushed to our son and screamed, 'half his head is gone'," he told AFP, his voice quivering and breaking into tears. In Kyiv, 19-year-old Yeva said the roof collapsed on her mother and two-year-old brother when a Russian drone crashed into it, almost completely destroying the apartment block.

"They were saved by a miracle, because the attic collapsed right onto them," she told AFP. Ukrainian President Zelensky, on a tour of Europe, called for a minute of silence for those killed, at an event in a church in the Netherlands. "Today in Ukraine is another very hard day, a really hard night, the day after a massive Russian attack," he said. The attack "has proven Russia does not deserve any easing of global policy or lifting of sanctions," he wrote on social media. EU council chief Antonio Costa accused Russia of choosing to "deliberately terrorise civilians", decrying the overnight killing as a "horrendous attack against civilian targets". Moscow has fired hundreds of drones on its neighbour almost nightly since the beginning of the war, with Kyiv regularly carrying out strikes on Russian energy and military targets in response. Russia's invasion of Ukraine, launched in February 2022, has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions, in what has become the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II. (Bssnews)