By Blessing Nweke
Russia launched a broad overnight assault on Ukraine late Wednesday, sending drones and missiles into several major cities and killing at least 13 people, according to Ukrainian officials.
Authorities said the dead included a 12-year-old boy in Kyiv, where rescue teams worked through the night to search damaged apartment blocks for survivors.
Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said five people died in the capital after a 16-storey residential building partly collapsed in the central Podilsky district. Mayor Vitali Klitschko said crews pulled a mother and her child alive from the rubble.
Four emergency medical workers were among the injured in Kyiv after repeat strikes hit areas where first responders had already arrived.
In the southeastern city of Dnipro, regional officials reported two deaths and at least 10 injuries as fires spread through several buildings. Images shared online showed flames rising above residential neighbourhoods.
In the Black Sea port of Odesa, local authorities said missile and drone strikes killed six people and damaged civilian infrastructure.
Kharkiv officials said a 77-year-old woman and a 66-year-old man were injured when a drone struck a residential area in the eastern city.
Across the border, Russia’s Krasnodar region reported that a Ukrainian drone attack killed two children, aged five and 14, according to Governor Veniamin Kondratyev.
The latest exchange came days after a short Easter ceasefire that both Moscow and Kyiv accused each other of violating.
Ukraine has continued to call for a full ceasefire as the first step toward new peace talks, but Russia has said a broader settlement must be agreed before any lasting pause in the fighting.
With the war now in its fifth year, civilians remain caught between stalled diplomacy and violence.
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