Russia has fired scores of missiles and drones at the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and the northeastern city of Kharkiv, killing at least five civilians, wounding dozens and causing widespread damage, officials said.
The third successive day of air strikes on Ukraine followed a warning by President Vladimir Putin yesterday, that a Ukrainianair attack on the Russian city of Belgorod, which Moscow said killed 25 civilians, would "not go unpunished".
Smoke rose out of the charred side of a high-rise residential building where Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said missile debris had come crashing down metres away, leaving a crater.
He said an elderly woman had died in an ambulance after being wounded at the site and that 43 other people were hurt.
Emergency services said a body had also been recovered on the eighth floor of the damaged building.
"Russia will answer for every life (that it has) taken away," President Volodymyr Zelensky said on the Telegram messing app.
Kira Rudik, a member of the Ukrainian parliament, told how she woke up to an air raid siren before her apartment block was damaged in the strikes.
She told RTÉ's News at One: "There was an explosion and fires then everything went dark.
"This is when the explosion happened near where I live and it was so hard that some of the buildings are totally burned.
"The walls are destroyed and the windows were taken off their frames.
"It was a shock and it felt like Armageddon. The worst thing was after this, the explosions and attacks did not stop,"
She said that attacks continued and more missiles and explosions while people were trying to look for each other, and she went out to see if her neighbours were okay as well as her pet cat.
She said that the destruction happening to the peaceful cities of Ukraine are terrifying.
She added: "We don’t have any guarantee when we go to bed in the evening that we’ll wake up in the morning so that’s why we continue to plea to allies for more air defence systems and air defence missiles, this is the only chance for us to survive. Today I was lucky but what about tomorrow."
Russia stepped up its missile and drone strikes on Ukraine on 29 December when it launched its largest air attack of the war, killing at least 39 people.
Almost two years after Moscow's full-scale invasion, Russia holds swathes of territory in eastern and southern Ukraine, and there is no end in sight to the war. Russia depicts a Ukrainian counteroffensive launched in mid-2023 as a failure, and frontlines have changed little in recent months.
Mr Klitschko said gas pipelines had been damaged in Kyiv's Pecherskyi district, and electricity and water had been cut offin several districts of the capital.
Private energy company DTEK was working to restore power, but the outages brought back memories of last winter when Russia pounded the energy grid with missiles, causing frequent power cuts and plunging millions into darkness.
Ukrainian air defences, boosted by supplies from Kyiv's Western allies, downed all ten incoming "Kinzhal" missiles fired in the latest attack as well as 59 of the 70 cruise missiles and all three Kalibr cruise missiles, army chief General Valeriy Zaluzhnyi said.
Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba called on Kyiv's Western allies to accelerate supplies of air defence systems, long-range missiles and combat drones.
In Kharkiv, a 91-year-old woman was killed in a missile attack that left a metres-deep crater near damaged residential buildings, Oleh Synehubov, Kharkiv's regional governor, said.
Forty-five people were wounded in the attack on the city centre, he said.
The volley of missiles was preceded by a drone attack that Ukraine said it had repelled hours earlier.
A married couple were killed and 11 people were hurt in the area outside Kyiv, the regional administration said. A dozen residential buildings and at least 60 cars were also damaged, it said.
One killed, five wounded in Ukrainian strikes on Belgorod
Ukrainian strikes on Russia's border Belgorod region killed at least one person Tuesday and wounded five, the local governor said.
"There is one victim: a man who was driving in a car when a shell exploded nearby," Belgorod governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said on social media.
He said four people were wounded near a car garage and one woman was wounded when debris fell on the bus she was in.
Russia said it shot down nine Ukrainian missiles over Belgorod.
