Kyiv residents and officials on Friday marked the latest deaths from a Russian missile attack that flattened a nine-story apartment building, as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the toll had risen to 24, including three teenagers. Zelenskyy led the mourning for what he described as one of the deadliest strikes on the capital during the war that began in 2022.
Zelenskyy said the cruise missile hit the apartment block Thursday and that emergency workers completed searches through the rubble after more than a day. Crowds of grieving people, including children, streamed to a makeshift memorial near the destroyed building, where teenagers arrived holding bouquets and left flowers and stuffed toys beside photographs of the dead.
Zelenskyy said that in Kyiv, 48 people were wounded, including two children. He said the strike happened during what Ukraine’s air force described as Russia’s biggest barrage across the country.
At the site, Zelenskyy and other senior officials visited to pay tribute, and Kyiv-based foreign diplomats also went to the area. In the memorial’s photographs, Zelenskyy said a portrait of a girl in a school uniform was among the images displayed beneath the tree near the wreckage.
Zelenskyy tied the timing of the attack to the recent U.S.-brokered ceasefire period that began around May 9 and ran for 72 hours, during which he said fighting continued but on a reportedly lesser scale. This week’s attacks, he said, came after U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the war’s end and days before the Kyiv strike.
Zelenskyy also said Russia had launched more than 1,560 drones against Ukrainian population centers since Wednesday, and that about 180 sites across the country were damaged, including more than 50 residential buildings. He contrasted Thursday’s Kyiv casualties with earlier Russian attacks, noting that in July 2024, a strike on Kyiv killed 32 civilians and injured another 85.
Zelenskyy said Ukraine’s experts had analyzed the wreckage of the cruise missile and concluded it was built in the second quarter of this year. In a separate post late Thursday, he said the finding meant Russia was still importing components and equipment needed for missile production while trying to circumvent global sanctions, and he urged partners to treat the issue as a priority.
Russia also reported damage outside Ukraine’s capital. Russia’s Defense Ministry said a Ukrainian drone struck Ryazan, a city about 100 kilometers (60 miles) southeast of Moscow, killing four people including a child; it said massive plumes of black smoke rose from a fire at an oil refinery. The regional governor, Pavel Malkov, said Ukrainian officials did not immediately comment on the strike.
In addition to the attacks, Zelenskyy said Russia and Ukraine swapped 205 prisoners of war, describing it as the first phase of a planned exchange of 1,000 POWs from each side. He said some of the Ukrainians had been held by Russia since 2022 and fought in some of the war’s fiercest battles, while Russia’s Defense Ministry confirmed the exchange and thanked the United Arab Emirates for helping broker it.