A barrage of Russian drones and missiles on Ukraine overnight killed at least four people in cities across the country, including a 10-year-old boy, regional officials said Monday.
AFP journalists at the scene of one strike on the southern city of Odesa saw gutted buildings and fire and emergency services working by lamplight to perform CPR on one of the victims.
The Ukrainian air force said Russia had launched 11 ballistic missiles and 149 drones -- including Iranian-designed Shaheds -- at the country from Sunday evening into the early hours of Monday.
Air defense units downed more than one hundred drones and several of the missiles, they added without elaborating.
Russia, which invaded Ukraine nearly four years ago, has bombarded its neighbor while joining recent rounds of US-brokered talks to end Europe's deadliest conflict since World War II.
Mykhailo, a 32-year-old resident of the port city of Odesa who lives on the fourth floor of a residential building damaged overnight, told AFP that his apartment windows had been blown out and his car was damaged.
"First we heard the buzzing of a Shahed, and then the hit -- and then another hit," the postal worker said.
A seventeen-year-old student, also named Mykhailo, told AFP when he stepped out onto his balcony he saw the doorframe had been dislodged by the blast.
Local officials in the city said that a 35-year-old man was killed and that two more were wounded, including a 19-year-old woman.
Farther north in the Kharkiv region, state emergency services said they had recovered the bodies of a woman and a 10-year-old boy after a drone attack.
And a 71-year-old man was killed by Russian drones in his bed in the settlement of Novgorod-Siversky in the northern Chernigiv region, local authorities said.
Though Washington wants to see the war end by mid-year, Kyiv and Moscow remain at odds over territorial divisions, with Russia pushing for full control of Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region as part of any deal.
Russia occupies around 20 percent of Ukraine's land.
