Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has urged international leaders to increase their pressure on Russia, after Moscow’s forces intensified strikes on Ukraine overnight.
The Ukrainian leader said rescuers are working in over 30 Ukrainian cities and villages after nearly 300 attack drones and almost 70 missiles, including ballistic ones, were launched by Russia overnight.
“The targets were Kyiv and the region, as well as Zhytomyr, Khmelnytskyi, Ternopil, Chernihiv, Sumy, Odesa, Poltava, Dnipro, Mykolaiv, Kharkiv and Cherkasy regions,” he wrote in a post on X, in which he said the strikes were deliberately targeting “ordinary cities”.
Zelenskyy added:
Each such terrorist Russian strike is a sufficient reason for new sanctions against Russia.
Russia is dragging out this war and continues to kill every day. The world may go on a weekend break, but the war continues, regardless of weekends and weekdays. This cannot be ignored. Silence of America, silence of others around the world only encourage Putin.
Without truly strong pressure on the Russian leadership, this brutality cannot be stopped. Sanctions will certainly help. Determination matters now – the determination of the United States, of European countries, and of all those around the world who seek peace.
Our correspondent Peter Beaumont, who is in Kyiv at the moment, has reported on the prisoner swap and has more from Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who vowed: “We will definitely bring back every single one of our people from Russian captivity.”
You can read his full report here
Here are some of the latest images sent to us over the newswires from Ukraine after the huge overnight Russian drone and missile attack that has killed at least 12 people across the country:
The Guardian’s senior international correspondent, Peter Beaumont, has written some analysis on the state of the war as Russia intensifies its assault on Ukraine and ignores calls for a ceasefire. Here is an extract from his piece:
Ukrainian and western officials anticipate that Russia will once again attempt a large-scale offensive during the summer, even if they are highly sceptical that it will be effective given Moscow’s punishing losses.
The reality is that with deadlock on the ground, the escalating long-range drone war on both sides is becoming ever more significant, even if it cannot conquer territory.
As it has become ever larger, with Russian and Ukrainian factories turning out thousands of new drones, it has become more sophisticated with Moscow’s employment of big numbers of decoys and systems designed to fool air defence systems.
While Ukraine has targeted bases and factories, including those producing fibre optic cable for a new generation of small combat zones, the purpose on Russia’s side appears aimed solely at undermining morale on the home front. In recent days, drones and missiles have hit apartment blocks, homes and a student dormitory.
The EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, has called for “the strongest international pressure” on Russia, after two days of heavy Russian air raids that hit civilian buildings across Ukraine.
Last night’s attacks again show Russia bent on more suffering and the annihilation of Ukraine.
Devastating to see children among innocent victims harmed and killed. My thoughts are with the families today.
We need the strongest international pressure on Russia to stop this war.
Kallas, the former Estonian prime minister, is a staunch ally of Ukraine. She has said recently that she does not think Russia is truly interested in establishing peace in Ukraine.
The EU on Tuesday agreed to impose fresh sanctions on Russia, notably targeting almost 200 ships from the shadow fleet illicitly transporting oil to skirt western restrictions put in place over Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin said earlier this week that Russian forces have orders to create a “security buffer zone” along the border.
That would help prevent Ukraine from striking areas inside Russia with artillery, the Russian president told a government meeting, but he gave no details of where the proposed buffer zone would be or how far it would stretch.
Russian troops have taken control of the village of Romanivka in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, the Russian defence ministry said on Sunday in a statement. We have not been able to independently verify this claim.
Moscow currently controls about 20% of Ukrainian territory and has been making incremental battlefield gains, although Russian forces have been hit by a depletion of resources and numerous failed offensives since the start of the year.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has just confirmed that 303 Ukrainian captives have been returned from Russia in the final stage of the biggest prisoner exchange since Russia launched its full-scale assault in February 2022.
“Today, warriors of our Armed Forces, the National Guard, the State Border Guard Service, and the State Special Transport Service are returning home,” he said in a post on Telegram.
Russia and Ukraine have completed a three-day prisoner of war exchange, with each side swapping 303 more detainees on Sunday, according to Russia’s defence ministry.
“Thus, in accordance with the Russian-Ukrainian agreements reached on May 16 in Istanbul, for the period from May 23 to May 25, the Russian and Ukrainian sides carried out an exchange on the formula of 1,000 for 1,000 people,” ministry said.
The major prisoner swap was agreed during talks last week in Istanbul. There are no direct peace talks scheduled to take place between Russia and Ukraine in the future.
When Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago, he demanded that Ukraine renounce joining Nato, sharply cut its army, and “protect” Russian language and culture to keep the country in Moscow’s orbit.
He since has also demanded that Kyiv withdraw its forces from the four regions Moscow illegally annexed in September 2022 but never fully occupied — Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy this week rejected Russia’s demands for Ukraine to withdraw its troops from these regions. “No one will withdraw our troops from our territories,” he told reporters.
It is therefore difficult to see a breakthrough in the negotiations happening anytime soon.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has urged international leaders to increase their pressure on Russia, after Moscow’s forces intensified strikes on Ukraine overnight.
The Ukrainian leader said rescuers are working in over 30 Ukrainian cities and villages after nearly 300 attack drones and almost 70 missiles, including ballistic ones, were launched by Russia overnight.
“The targets were Kyiv and the region, as well as Zhytomyr, Khmelnytskyi, Ternopil, Chernihiv, Sumy, Odesa, Poltava, Dnipro, Mykolaiv, Kharkiv and Cherkasy regions,” he wrote in a post on X, in which he said the strikes were deliberately targeting “ordinary cities”.
Zelenskyy added:
Each such terrorist Russian strike is a sufficient reason for new sanctions against Russia.
Russia is dragging out this war and continues to kill every day. The world may go on a weekend break, but the war continues, regardless of weekends and weekdays. This cannot be ignored. Silence of America, silence of others around the world only encourage Putin.
Without truly strong pressure on the Russian leadership, this brutality cannot be stopped. Sanctions will certainly help. Determination matters now – the determination of the United States, of European countries, and of all those around the world who seek peace.
The intense air attack comes after US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin had a two-hour phone call to discuss a US-proposed Ukraine ceasefire deal on Monday.
Trump said after the call that Russia and Ukraine would immediately start negotiations for a ceasefire, but the Kremlin said the process would take time and the US president indicated he was not ready to join Europe with fresh sanctions to pressure Moscow.
European leaders decided to increase pressure on Russia through sanctions after Trump briefed them on his call with the Russian leader, who appears unwilling to significantly budge from his maximalist positions.
Putin has only said that Moscow would work with Kyiv to craft a “memorandum” on a “possible future peace”. He has declined to support the US-proposed 30-day unconditional ceasefire, which Ukraine had already agreed to.
Ukrainian interior minister Ihor Klymenko confirmed 12 people had been killed and 60 more injured in the huge overnight Russian drone and missile attack.
Other death tolls given separately by regional authorities and rescuers had put the number of people killed at 13. We have not been able to independently verify either casualty figure.
“This was a combined, ruthless strike aimed at civilians. The enemy once again showed that its goal is fear and death,” Klymenko wrote on Telegram.
At least 11 people have been reported injured in Kyiv, with the drone attacks sparking multiple fires and damage to residential buildings, including a dormitory.
Residents were pictured taking refuge in subway stations to stay safe from the explosions.
The attack coincided with Kyiv Day, an annual city holiday usually celebrated on the last Sunday in May.
At least 12 people have been killed and dozens others injured after Russian forces launched the biggest overnight drone and missile attack across Ukraine since the start of Moscow’s full-scale invasion in 2022, officials said.
Three children – aged 8, 12 and 17 years old – were killed in Zhytomyr, west of Kyiv, four people in the Kyiv region were killed, one in Mykolaiv in the south, and four in the Khmelnytskyi region, according to officials and reports.
The Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, was a particular focus of the drone strikes. The city’s mayor Vitali Klitschko said it was “under attack” but reassured people that the “air defences are operating” as they should.
Ukraine’s air force said on Sunday that Russia attacked the country with 298 drones and 69 missiles overnight, one of the largest aerial attacks since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. It said it downed 45 missiles and 266 drones.
It was “the most massive strike in terms of the number of air attack weapons on the territory of Ukraine since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in 2022,” Yuriy Ihnat, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s air force, told the Associated Press. The overnight strike was the largest attack of the war in terms of weapons fired, although other strikes have killed more people.
Russian air defences, meanwhile, intercepted 110 Ukrainian drones overnight, including 13 over the Moscow and Tver regions, the country’s defence ministry said. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
In Moscow, restrictions were imposed on at least four airports, including the main hub Sheremetyevo, the Russian civilian aviation authority said.
A day earlier, Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched 14 ballistic missiles and 250 attack drones on Kyiv, injuring 15 people in one of the biggest assaults on the Ukrainian capital since the beginning of the war more than three years ago.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said the attacks indicated Moscow was “prolonging the war … Only additional sanctions against key sectors of the Russian economy will force Moscow to agree to a ceasefire.”
As my colleague Peter Beaumont notes in this story, the air raids came as Russia and Ukraine exchanged hundreds more prisoners on Saturday in a continuing major swap that amounted to a rare moment of cooperation amid otherwise failed efforts to reach a ceasefire.
