Russian forces on Tuesday unleashed one of the largest daytime assaults on Ukraine since the war began, sending more than 550 drones slamming into city centers across the country.
Several people were killed and at least 40 others wounded, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. Apartment buildings, hospitals and a UNESCO World Heritage site all sustained damage, officials said.
The unusual daytime strikes followed a more typical series of overnight attacks in which Russian forces launched 34 missiles and 392 attack drones. Those killed two people in the Poltava region, one in Zaporizhzhia and another on a passenger train in Kharkiv, according to the local authorities.
Air-raid alarms warning of new waves of attack drones in Ukrainian airspace started sounding around noon, shuttering some businesses and sending people rushing for shelters in the middle of the workday.
Soon explosions were reported in the cities of Lviv, Ternopil, Vinnytsia, Ivano-Frankivsk, Zhytomyr, Zaporizhzhia and Dnipro.
“This is utterly perverse,” Mr. Zelensky said in his nightly address of the strikes, which came as he had been pushing to get peace talks with Russia back on track. “The scale of today’s attack,” he added, “strongly indicates that Russia has no intention of really ending this war.”
Ukraine’s Air Force called the daytime assault “one of the most massive attacks” of the war. Taken together with the drones deployed overnight, Russia launched more than 1,000 attack drones in under 24 hours across Ukraine, according to Air Force figures.
While air defenses shot down most, the Air Force said that 15 hits were recorded during the daytime strikes.
In the central city of Ivano-Frankivsk, two people were killed and four others were injured, the authorities said. Two maternity hospitals sustained damage, as did about 10 residential buildings.
One person was killed in Vinnytsia and 13 others injured, according to the emergency services. It said more than 90 rescuers had been deployed to respond to strikes, which damaged nine residential buildings.
Video shared by Ukraine’s public broadcaster showed a Shahed tearing into the historic center of Lviv, in western Ukraine. At least 26 people were wounded, according to Andriy Sadovyi, the mayor. Firefighters were still working to extinguish blazes sparked by the strikes as night fell.
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