The Ukrainian capital Kyiv entered a day of national mourning on Friday, one day after a deadly Russian missile attack claimed 24 civilian lives, including three young girls, even as Kyiv and Moscow moved forward with a major exchange of hundreds of prisoners of war, one of the last active channels of cooperation between the two warring nations.
Thursday’s attack, the deadliest strike on Kyiv in months, tore through a residential building, leaving a scene of twisted rubble and shattered lives. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the devastated site on Friday, where he condemned the assault as an act of unprovoked brutal terror. The three child victims, all girls aged 12, 15, and 17, included 12-year-old Liubava Yakovleva, who had already lost her father fighting against Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko confirmed. Rescue crews worked more than 28 straight hours to pull survivors from the rubble, ultimately saving 30 people, while 24 injured people remain hospitalized for treatment, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko reported.
The tragedy in Kyiv’s central neighborhoods unfolded alongside a rare moment of progress along the front: a coordinated prisoner swap that returned 205 captured Ukrainian troops to Ukrainian-controlled territory. Photographers on the ground captured emotional scenes as the newly freed soldiers, many gaunt after months or years in captivity, wrapped themselves in Ukrainian flags, cheered, embraced one another, and waited anxiously to reunite with their families. In exchange, Kyiv released 205 Russian soldiers, who were transported to Russia’s ally Belarus for medical and psychological support, per Russian defense officials.
Zelenskyy noted that this swap marked the first phase of a previously announced 1,000-for-1,000 prisoner exchange brokered by former U.S. President Donald Trump. Most of the released Ukrainian troops had been held in Russian captivity since the early months of the 2022 invasion, including fighters who defended the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol and personnel stationed at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant when Russian forces seized the site in the first weeks of the war. Prisoner exchanges have remained one of the only consistent areas of negotiation and cooperation between Kyiv and Moscow since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022.
In the wake of the Kyiv strike, Kyiv’s armed forces launched a wave of retaliatory overnight drone strikes on Russian territory. Russian officials confirmed that strikes on the southwestern Russian city of Ryazan, roughly 120 miles from Moscow, killed four people, including one child, and damaged two residential buildings and local industrial sites. Unverified social media footage from Ryazan shows thick plumes of smoke rising above the city of 500,000, with a multi-story apartment building left with several entire floors burned black. Retaliatory drone strikes on Russian territory are common throughout the ongoing war, but deadly attacks this close to the Russian capital remain rare.
The devastating attack on Kyiv has further dimmed already faint hopes for a breakthrough in stalled peace talks to end the conflict. Kyiv’s Western allies have accused Moscow of undermining diplomatic efforts to de-escalate the war. Russia has shown no willingness to step back from its core territorial demands, which require Ukraine to cede four eastern and southern regions that Russia illegally claimed to annex in 2022. Fresh Russian attacks continued across Ukraine on Friday: one person was killed in the southern Zaporizhzhia region, while a missile strike on a village in the northern Chernigiv region wounded a 45-year-old mother and her 13-year-old daughter, both of whom were hospitalized for treatment.