In a sharp escalation of hostilities following a widely violated 32-hour Orthodox Easter truce, overnight missile and drone barrages launched by Russia against multiple Ukrainian cities have killed at least 14 people — including a 12-year-old child — and left dozens more wounded, Ukrainian officials confirmed Thursday. Simultaneously, Ukrainian counter-strikes on Russian territory claimed the lives of two young children, according to Russian regional authorities, marking another bloody chapter in the four-year ongoing conflict.
The deadliest of Thursday’s reported attacks hit the southern Ukrainian Black Sea port city of Odesa, where seven people lost their lives in the barrage, regional military administration head Sergiy Lysak announced via his Telegram channel. In Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, the strikes left four people dead, including the 12-year-old boy, and injured at least 45 more — a group that includes several frontline medical workers, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko shared in a public update.
Images and damage assessments shared by Ukraine’s State Emergency Service paint a grim picture of the destruction across the capital: residential and commercial structures were set ablaze, vehicle parks were reduced to charred wrecks, building windows were shattered across multiple neighborhoods, and several prominent hotel buildings suffered significant external damage. In Kyiv’s Podilsky district, one attack leveled part of an 18-story residential apartment block after a drone struck the building directly; emergency responders managed to pull one surviving child from the rubble of the collapsed structure, Klitschko added.
Further casualties were recorded in central Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, where three people were killed in the strikes, regional administration head Oleksandr Ganzha confirmed. A separate attack on Kharkiv, Ukraine’s largest northeastern city, left two elderly residents wounded, regional military administration head Oleg Synegubov said.
The Russian strikes triggered a city-wide missile air raid alert across Kyiv, with capital military administration chief Tymur Tkachenko urging all residents to remain in secured shelter facilities until the threat was formally cleared.
On the Russian side of the border, two children — ages 5 and 14 — were killed in what regional governor Veniamin Kondratyev described as a terrorist drone attack on residential buildings in Tuapse, located in southern Russia’s Krasnodar Krai region. Kondratyev shared the news of the children’s deaths via his own Telegram channel Thursday morning.
The fresh wave of violence comes just days after the 32-hour unilateral Orthodox Easter truce, declared by Russia earlier in the week, ended amid mutual accusations of widespread violations from both Moscow and Kyiv. For months, Russia has launched near-daily drone and missile strikes across Ukrainian territory, while Ukrainian forces have regularly carried out retaliatory strikes on targets inside Russian borders, a tit-for-tat pattern that has continued to drive civilian casualties on both sides.