In the early hours of Thursday morning, Ukraine’s police reported that Russian drone strikes had hit eight districts in Kyiv.
“Residential buildings, vehicles, warehouses, office and non-residential buildings are burning,” administration head Tymur Tkachenko said in a post on Telegram.
Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko confirmed that a 68-year-old woman and a 22-year-old police officer at a metro station had been killed.
In Kyiv’s Podilsky district, a primary healthcare centre was “almost completely destroyed”, Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said.
City residents were urged to shelter until the air raid siren was lifted, and also close windows when they returned to their homes because there was a “lot of smoke” in Kyiv.
Overnight, Ukraine’s air force reported a threat of Russian drone attacks in a number of regions. It was not immediately clear whether there were any casualties outside Kyiv.
Russia’s military has not commented on the reported latest attack.
It followed what Ukraine described as the largest Russian aerial attack on Tuesday night, when 728 drones and 13 cruise or ballistic missiles struck cities across the country.
In June, Russia launched ten times more “missile and loitering munitions attacks” against Ukraine than in June last year, the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission (HRMMU) in Ukraine reported.
Civilians were killed or injured in at least 16 regions of the country and in Kyiv, the HRMMU said.
“Civilians across Ukraine are facing levels of suffering we have not seen in over three years,” Ms Danielle Bell, head of the HRMMU, said. “The surge in long-range missile and drone strikes across the country has brought even more death and destruction to civilians far away from the frontline.”
Late on Wednesday, three people were killed in a Russian air strike in the town of Kostiantynivka, close to the front line in eastern Ukraine, the country’s emergency service DSNS said.
“Russia is obviously stepping up terror,” Zelensky said. “It is necessary to be faster with sanctions and pressure Russia so that it feels the outcomes of its own terror. Our partners need to act faster investing in weapons production and developing tech.”
He said that on Thursday, he would be speaking to partners about additional financing for producing interceptor drones and air defence supplies.
The US had resumed sending some weapons to Ukraine, Reuters reported late on Wednesday, days after it halted shipments of some critical air defence arms.