Russian attacks on Ukraine kill 16 people, including a child

Deadly strikes hit Kyiv, Odesa, and Dnipro, while Russia says two children killed in Ukrainian attacks.

Russian strikes have killed at least 16 people in Ukraine, according to local authorities, after Moscow launched a wave of attacks on its neighbour overnight.

Moscow has fired missiles as well as hundreds of drones on its neighbour almost nightly since the beginning of the four-year war, with Kyiv regularly carrying out strikes within Russia in response to its attacks.

The Ukrainian air force said Russia had launched 659 drones in the attack and 44 missiles, over the last 24 hours, adding that its air defence units downed 636 drones and 31 missiles.

The latest attacks come after the end of a 32-hour Orthodox Easter truce marred by accusations of mass violations, according to both countries.

Missile and drone attacks on the southern port city of Odesa killed nine people, the head of the city’s military administration, Serhiy Lysak, wrote on Telegram on Thursday.

The strikes on the Ukrainian Black Sea port city also wounded 23 people.

Strikes on the capital Kyiv killed at least four people, including a 12-year-old child, the State Emergency Service of Ukraine said.

Kyiv’s Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said at least 48 people were injured in the strikes.

Three people were killed and 34 were wounded in the central Dnipropetrovsk region, Oleksandr Ganzha, head of the regional administration said on Telegram.

Russia’s Defence Ministry said ⁠on ⁠Thursday that its overnight attacks on ⁠Ukraine struck production facilities for cruise missiles and drones, ⁠as well as energy targets, which it said supplied Kyiv’s armed forces.

Moscow said the attack ‌was a response to Ukrainian strikes on civilian targets inside Russia.

A major Ukrainian overnight drone attack on Russia’s Black Sea port of Tuapse killed ⁠two children and sparked a large fire, Russian officials and media reported.

“A terrorist drone attack on residential buildings in Tuapse has claimed the lives of two minors aged five and 14,” its governor Veniamin Kondratyev wrote on Telegram.

EU council chief Antonio Costa accused Russia of choosing to “deliberately terrorise civilians” in Ukraine, decrying the overnight strikes as a “horrendous attack against civilian targets”.

The Russian air raids on Kyiv caused widespread damage across the Podilskyi, Obolonskyi and Desnyanskyi districts, according to the city’s mayor.

Across the Ukrainian capital, blasts set buildings and cars alight, shattered windows and damaged the facades of hotels, the State Emergency Service of Ukraine said in an assessment of the damage posted on Telegram.

In the Obolonskyi district, the strikes damaged an office building and set cars ablaze.

At least four medics were injured as a result of repeated shelling, Klitschko said.

Falling debris also set off a fire at a two-storey residential building in the Desnyanskyi district, he added.

Photos posted online showed fires burning out of control and smoke billowing skyward.

Al Jazeera’s Audrey Macalpine, reporting from Kyiv, said the overnight causalities in the latest attacks show the need for more interceptors in Ukraine.

“This is reflective of a larger problem for Ukraine, which is lack of interceptors,” she said, adding that Ukraine’s president is working to acquire more from Europe.

Recent months have seen several rounds of United States-brokered negotiations fail to bring the warring parties closer to an agreement to stop the fighting, triggered by Russia’s February 2022 invasion.

The process has stalled further since the outbreak of the war in the Middle East, with Washington’s attention having shifted towards Iran.

But even before the US-Israel war on Iran, progress towards a peace deal in Ukraine had been slow, due to differences over the issue of territory.

Ukraine has proposed freezing the conflict along the current front lines.

But Russia has rejected this, saying it wants the whole of the Donetsk region despite it being partly controlled by Ukraine – a demand Kyiv says is unacceptable.