A devastating Russian drone assault on a crowded civilian market in southern Ukraine has left five people dead and 21 wounded, including a 14-year-old girl, Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office confirmed Saturday. The strike hit the riverside town of Nikopol at 9:50 a.m. local time, just across the Dnipro River from Russian-held territory seized following Moscow’s full-scale February 2022 invasion. Photographs released by regional prosecutors show the aftermath: shattered market kiosks scattered across the ground, covered in twisted metal and broken glass. A follow-up strike on the same site injured two more men, and Ukrainian authorities have launched a war crime investigation into the attacks. Nikopol has faced persistent artillery and drone fire since the start of the invasion, with nearly half of its original 100,000 residents fleeing for safety long before the weekend attack. The Saturday market strike marks the deadliest escalation in a wave of Russian attacks that killed at least 15 civilians across Ukraine in strikes on Friday alone. Overnight preceding the Nikopol attack, the Ukrainian Air Force reported that Russia launched nearly 300 drones across Ukrainian territory, with additional casualties recorded in the northeastern city of Kharkiv and the northern Sumy region. In a tit-for-tat escalation that has become common in the conflict, Russia reported a Ukrainian overnight drone and missile strike on the southern Russian city of Taganrog that killed one person and left four others with severe injuries. Rostov regional governor Yuri Slyusar confirmed the strike sparked a large fire at a local logistics company’s facility. A Ukrainian defense ministry spokesperson pushed back on casualty claims, attributing civilian deaths to flawed Russian air defense operations. Ukrainian officials also confirmed two targeted strikes on facilities they say were tied directly to Russia’s military industrial complex. One attack hit a synthetic rubber and petrochemical plant in the Russian city of Togliatti, while a second drone strike halted all production at the Alchevsk metallurgical plant in Russian-occupied Luhansk Oblast. Ukraine’s Security Service reported that blast furnaces, production workshops and critical infrastructure at the plant were damaged in the strike, the second to hit the facility in just one month. This latest round of deadly cross-border attacks comes as diplomatic efforts to end the 2-year-long conflict remain stalled. Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky proposed a bilateral truce between the two warring nations to mark the Orthodox Easter holiday, but Moscow has yet to respond to the offer. Recent weeks have also seen a sharp uptick in large-scale Russian daytime attacks, a tactic that was rare earlier in the conflict. Despite the rising civilian death toll from these strikes, British intelligence assessments note that the frontline situation in eastern Ukraine is the most favorable it has been for Kyiv in 10 months, as Russian offensive advances have slowed to a near halt. Diplomatic progress, however, has ground to a halt, with U.S.-led peace negotiations shifting focus to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, leaving little momentum for new talks to end the war in Ukraine. Zelensky completed a diplomatic tour of four Gulf nations last week – Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Jordan – all of which have recently faced Iranian aerial attacks. During the tour, the Ukrainian president offered to share Kyiv’s advanced drone technology and operational expertise in exchange for support countering Russian missile strikes and new, stable sources of fuel imports. The urgency for alternative fuel supplies has grown amid surging global oil prices, compounded by persistent Russian strikes on Ukraine’s domestic energy infrastructure that have left the country almost entirely reliant on imported fuel to sustain its military and civilian operations.