Wave of Russian drone and missile attacks kill 15 in Ukraine

Russia launched a wave of drone and missile attacks across Ukraine on Wednesday night, killing at least 15 people and injuring at least 90, Ukrainian officials said.

A 12-year-old boy was among four victims in the capital, and three people were killed in Dnipro in the southeast.

Across the border, two children, aged five and 14, were killed in a Ukrainian drone attack in Russia's Krasnodar Krai region, its governor Veniamin Kondratyev said on Telegram.

The strikes come after a short ceasefire took place over Orthodox Easter celebrations at the weekend, during which both sides accused one another of hundreds of violations.

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko wrote on Telegram that as well as the deaths in the capital, rescuers had pulled a mother and child from the ruins of a 16-storey residential building that collapsed in Kyiv's central Podilsky district.

In the north of the capital, four emergency medical workers were among those injured as a result of repeated shelling.

In an attack on the central city of Dnipro, three people were killed and dozens were injured, Oleksandr Ganzha, head of the regional administration, wrote on Telegram. Pictures posted online showed buildings ablaze in the city.

Elsewhere, missile and drone attacks on the southern port city of Odesa killed eight people, the head of the city's military administration Sergiy Lysak wrote on Telegram.

And in Kharkiv, a drone strike injured a 77-year-old woman and a 66-year-old man, an official said.

Ukraine's Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said: "Such attacks cannot be normalised. These are war crimes that must be stopped and their perpetrators held to account."

He called on other countries to "take immediate action" by issuing sanctions against Russia or offering packages of support for Ukraine.

"All decisions required to increase pressure on the aggressor must be unblocked now," Sybiha wrote on X on Thursday.

The war in Ukraine is now in its fifth year and there have been several rounds of peace talks, with the US acting as a mediator.

However, the process has been stalled since US President Donald Trump shifted his focus to the war in the Middle East.

What Ukraine has repeatedly proposed is a full, stable ceasefire as a first step towards negotiating a lasting end to Russia's invasion.

But Moscow insists on agreeing the peace deal first, prompting accusations from Kyiv that Russia is not serious about ending the fighting.