Russia launched a vast missile and drone attack across Ukraine overnight and early Thursday morning, killing at least 18 people and destroying any thought that the temporary Easter truce announced by President Vladimir V. Putin meant anything more permanent.
The strikes sent plumes of smoke above the capital, Kyiv, in the early morning and also targeted the port city of Odesa and the central-eastern city of Dnipro. Bone-rattling explosions of air-defense interceptors and ballistic missiles hitting their targets jarred residents out of bed.
Russia sent 659 drones and 44 missiles, including 19 ballistic ones, into Ukrainian cities from 7 a.m. on Wednesday to 7 a.m. on Thursday, according to the Ukrainian Air Force. It was the largest such barrage in months and one of the largest of the war.
In Kyiv, four people were killed, including a 12-year-old boy, and 48 other people were injured, according to the mayor, Vitali Klitschko. He added on social media at 5 a.m. Kyiv time that Russian strikes had also injured four medics who had been responding to an earlier attack at an office building.
A drone punched a hole in the side of a multistory apartment building shortly after Olena Kapustian, 41, started getting her 11-year-old son ready for school on Thursday. She said in an interview that she had been listening as air defenses tried to intercept the drone, then watched it pass the corridor window of her 16th-floor apartment and then come straight at her building.
“It was like a comet,” she said.
The explosion tore through the upper floors, blowing out windows, flinging open cabinets and doors and leaving a gaping hole in the facade. It was the second time the building had been hit. The last strike was in March 2025, causing a fire. Ms. Kapustian said she no longer tried to make sense of the war.
“We pray every day for it to end,” she said. “We want our children to live, to see life — not shelters and sirens.”
Elsewhere, at least nine people were killed in Odesa, four in the Dnipropetrovsk region and one in Kharkiv, officials said.
Peace negotiations over the war in Ukraine, now in its fifth year, have stalled since February, largely because of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran.
After repeated calls by President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine for a cease-fire over Orthodox Easter, Mr. Putin announced one last week.
It was the second year in a row that Mr. Putin had called for a temporary truce. Both the Ukrainian and Russian sides, as they did last year, accused each other of repeatedly violating the cease-fire, which Mr. Putin said would last 32 hours. The reported assaults occurred along the front lines; cities were spared any major attacks.
The intense assault on Wednesday night and early Thursday indicated that Russia was again ramping up attacks on civilian targets, including by using ballistic missiles.
Ukraine can knock down those weapons only with American-designed Patriot interceptors. Kyiv has repeatedly asked the West for more Patriots, but there is a limited supply worldwide, and many have been used by Western allies in the spillover from the war in Iran.
In an interview on Tuesday with ZDF, a German broadcaster, Mr. Zelensky said that Ukraine’s deficit of Patriots “can’t get any worse.”
Still, in the overnight attacks, Ukraine managed to destroy eight of the ballistic missiles, according to the Ukrainian Air Force. It also knocked down 636 of the drones, the military said.
Kim Barker is a Times reporter writing in-depth stories about the war in Ukraine.
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