Russia fired more than 30 missiles at Kyiv early this morning, the largest attack on the Ukrainian capital in weeks after Russian President Vladimir Putin vowed retribution for escalating strikes on Russia's border regions.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on the West to deliver air defence systems after the attacks, which wounded 17 in Kyiv and the surrounding region.
For weeks a vital €55 billion US military aid package for Ukraine has been blocked in Congress amid domestic political arguments.
Ukraine's air force said it shot down 31 Russian missiles fired towards Kyiv.
"Such terror continues every day and night," Mr Zelensky said in a Telegram post.
"It is possible to put an end to it through global unity... Russian terrorists do not have missiles capable of bypassing Patriot and other leading world systems.
"This protection is required in Ukraine now. From Kyiv to Kharkiv, Sumy to Kherson, and Odesa to the Donetsk region. This is entirely possible if our partners demonstrate sufficient political will."
Mr Zelensky urged European Union leaders to send more air defences to his country and to use billions of euros in profits from frozen Russian financial assets and the assets themselves to support Ukraine.
In his video address to the two-day summit in Brussels he also called on allies to provide more artillery for his outgunned troops.
He said that allowing unfettered access to Russian grain while capping imports from Ukraine was "unfair".
"Russian access to the European agricultural market is still unrestricted," Mr Zelenksy said by video link.
"When Ukrainian grain is thrown on the roads or railway tracks, Russian products are still being transported to Europe, as well as goods from (Vladimir) Putin's controlled Belarus -- this is not fair."
The Ukrainian Air Force said Russia fired two Iskander ballistic missiles and 29 cruise missiles, launched from strategic bombers.
"Our defenders worked successfully and shot down all the missiles," said Oleksiy Kuleba, the deputy head of the President's office.
Mr Zelensky posted a video of windows blown out of a residential building and debris strewn across the street as firefighters used water hoses on the smoking building.
It was the first missile strike on the Ukrainian capital since early February, said Sergiy Popko, head of the Kyiv city military administration.
Russia's defence ministry said that it had targeted Ukrainian military sites with "long-range high-precision weapons, including Kinzhal hypersonic missiles."
"The objectives of the strike have been achieved. All targets were hit," it said in a daily briefing.
Elsewhere a Russian missile attack on Ukraine's southern city of Mykolaiv killed at least one person and injured four others, a local official said.
It was not immediately clear what was being targeted.
The attack comes after a sharp escalation in Ukrainian strikes on Russian border regions and oil refineries over the last two weeks.
The Russian governor of the Belgorod region, on the border with Ukraine, said five people were wounded in the latest aerial bombardment there.
"In the city of Belgorod, more than 30 apartments in six residential buildings were damaged as a result of an air attack by the Ukrainian armed forces," governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said on Telegram.
He published photos showing damaged facades and smashed windows in multi-storey apartment blocks.
Speaking last week after a wave of Ukrainian drone, rocket and artillery attacks on Russia, President Vladimir Putin said: "These strikes by the enemy do not and will not go unpunished."
Yesterday he vowed to restore "security" to the border areas and said that Russia had a "plan" to delivery victory against Kyiv.
Russia's FSB security service also today that it had arrested a Russian citizen in Belgorod who was preparing "terrorist acts against the Russian military", Russian state media reported.
It said the person was working with the "Russian Volunteer Corps", one of the militia groups that claimed to be behind a string of attempted armed cross-border incursions last week.
Russia's defence ministry claimed to have captured the village of Tonenke in east Ukraine, around 10 kms from the city of Avdiivka, which fell to Russian forces last month.
EU summit
EU leaders grappled at a summit meeting with how to get more weapons to Ukraine's outgunned forces while also re-arming their own countries.
Over two years into Moscow's war against its neighbour, Mr Putin has tightened his iron grip over his country by winning a new six-year term at elections after opposition was crushed.
"On Ukraine, we need to continue and certainly accelerate our support," Belgium Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said at the start of the meeting.
"The necessity today is ammunition."
The European Union's 27 leaders debated a plan to spend profits from €200 billion in frozen Russian central bank assets on weapons for Ukraine.
The proposal could unlock some €3 billion a year for Kyiv, but leaders were not expected to give the final go-ahead today.
That would come on top of more than €33 billion that the EU says it has provided towards arming Ukraine since the Kremlin invaded in February 2022.
Germany's Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who had been cautious about undermining EU markets, threw his weight behind the plan as legally sound.
But the Kremlin warned it would use legal and "other methods of retaliation" to hit back.
Alongside the efforts to get more weapons to Kyiv, the EU is also scrambling for ways to boost Europe's defence industry to be able to arm Ukraine and build up its own forces.
Brussels has put forward a raft of proposals aimed at ramping up capacity but there are complaints that Europe is still not moving fast enough.
While Russia has put its economy on a war footing, the EU has fallen well short of a promise made last year to supply Ukraine with a million artillery shells by this month.
Meanwhile, the Czech Republic has spearheaded its own initiative aimed at hoovering up hundreds of thousands of shells available around the world to send to Kyiv.
France and Estonia have pitched the idea of using joint borrowing, similar to the massive package of support the EU came up with during the Covid pandemic, to fund defence spending.
But a majority of member states, led by so-called "frugal" countries such as Germany, are unwilling to go anywhere near that far.
"If that doesn't fly, then propose something else, some other solution that we can solve this problem, because there is a big problem of funding the defence industry," Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas said.
Instead, the discussion was set to focus on getting the EU's lending arm, the European Investment Bank, to expand its funding for the sector.
At the moment, the bank is limited to investing in only a small number of "dual-use products" that can have both military and civilian functions.
