Russia attacked the south-eastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia with five glide bombs on Saturday morning, killing at least 15 people, three of them children, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky and emergency services.
Residential buildings were hit. At least 16 other people were injured, and more are still missing and believed to be trapped beneath the rubble, BBC News reported.
Zelensky said 13 other Ukrainian regions were also struck overnight, and warned that Ukraine would respond.
The strikes came only hours after President Donald Trump announced a deal to import Russian diesel into the United States.
Images and footage recorded at the scene of one of the strikes show an apartment block that has been largely destroyed.
“The ground floor was hit, and the floors above just collapsed,” acting Mayor Regina Kharchenko told Ukrainian television from the site.
She said more than 80 workers were taking part in search and rescue operations, which were expected to run through the day. Rescue teams regularly pause to listen for sounds from any survivors still beneath the debris, she added.
Kharchenko said Russia had struck “our very heart”, and that “our littlest ones” were among the dead. She described the deaths as “awful grief for their families. For the city.”
Zelensky has been sharply critical of Trump’s diesel agreement with Russia, describing it as a gift to President Vladimir Putin and as “an investment in a war that must be ended, not prolonged”.
In his response to the overnight attacks, he wrote on X that Russia reads any easing of pressure as permission to keep fighting, and that Moscow must be made to feel its losses if the war is to stop.
Both countries have intensified strikes on infrastructure in recent months as the war continues.
Zaporizhzhia is a major regional centre of more than 700,000 residents, located less than 10 miles (16 km) from the front line, and is regularly hit by Russian drones and missiles.
The latest attack on the city follows a sharp rise in Russian strikes causing large numbers of civilian casualties.
On Thursday, at least 33 people died when another Russian glide bomb attack hit two civilian buses in Kramatorsk, in the eastern Donetsk region. The previous day, 22 people, including five children, were killed when a Russian missile struck an apartment block in Pryluky, east of Kyiv.
The United Nations says civilian casualties in Ukraine rose by 55% in the first eight months of this year.
Russia has also targeted Ukrainian energy infrastructure, increasing such attacks each winter since Putin launched a full-scale invasion in 2022. Ukraine has in turn struck Russian infrastructure, most recently data centres owned by technology company Yandex.
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