KYIV, Ukraine — A Russian cruise missile strike on a nine-story apartment building killed 24 people, including three teenagers, as rescue crews finished digging through the rubble on Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said while leading the mourning for one of the deadliest attacks on the capital since Moscow’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
Crowds of grieving people — many of them children — streamed toward a makeshift memorial beneath a tree near the destroyed building. Teenagers clutching bouquets arrived in groups and broke into tears as they approached a growing mound of flowers and stuffed toys beside photographs of the dead. A portrait of a girl in a school uniform, posed against a bright yellow backdrop, was among the photos.
Zelenskyy and other top government officials visited the site to pay tribute to the dead, as did Kyiv-based foreign diplomats.
The attack came despite a 72-hour ceasefire from May 9 to 11 that U.S. President Donald Trump said he had asked Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin to observe. Fighting continued over those three days, though reportedly on a lesser scale, and this week’s barrage undermined suggestions from Trump and Putin that the war is close to ending.
Zelenskyy said Moscow had launched more than 1,560 drones against Ukrainian population centers since Wednesday, damaging about 180 sites across the country, including more than 50 residential buildings. The previous largest Russian drone attack was on March 23-24, when Moscow’s forces fired nearly 1,000 drones and missiles at Ukraine. Thursday’s death toll approached that of a July 2024 attack that killed 32 civilians and injured 85 in Kyiv.
Russia reported a Ukrainian drone attack on Ryazan, a city about 100 kilometers southeast of Moscow. Regional Gov. Pavel Malkov said the strike killed four people, including a child, and massive plumes of black smoke rose from a fire at an oil refinery. Ukraine has routinely targeted Russian oil facilities to deny revenue for the Kremlin. Ukrainian officials made no immediate comment on the strike.
Zelenskyy said the cruise missile that hit the Kyiv apartment building was manufactured in the second quarter of this year, apparently after Ukrainian experts analyzed the wreckage. “This means Russia is still importing the components, resources and equipment necessary for missile production in circumvention of global sanctions,” he said in a post on X late Thursday. “Stopping Russia’s sanctions evasion schemes must be a genuine priority for all our partners.”
Also on Friday, Russia and Ukraine swapped 205 prisoners of war, an exchange that Zelenskyy said was the first phase of a planned swap of 1,000 POWs from each side. Some of the Ukrainians had been held since 2022 and fought in some of the war’s fiercest battles, he added. Russia’s Defense Ministry confirmed the exchange and thanked the United Arab Emirates for helping to broker it.