As Lviv and other western regions were targeted on Thursday night, more than a dozen missiles and hundreds of drones were deployed during the attack on Kyiv.
A paramedic was among those killed while arriving at a damaged apartment in Kyiv. The capital’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, and Zelensky said it had been a “double-tap” hit – in which the first strike is followed by a second, killing rescuers who have arrived to help the injured.
Two apartment buildings along the east bank of the Dnipro River and a high-rise building in the city’s central district were also targeted.
The morning after, as the clean-up got underway, the businesses that hadn’t been damaged were open.
A coffee shop just a few floors down from a destroyed apartment was serving customers. Wreckage from a Russian drone, including its wings and engine, were still scattered over the pavement outside.
At another site, the round, charred entry hole of a missile was visible on the 11th floor of an apartment block in a quiet residential area.
The power supply was disrupted in several of the city’s neighbourhoods in the middle of a particularly harsh winter and as Kyiv braces for -15C (5F) temperatures this weekend.
On Friday Klitschko urged Kyiv residents to leave temporarily if they were able to, and find warmth.
“Half of Kyiv’s apartment buildings – nearly 6,000 – are currently without heat due to damage to the capital’s critical infrastructure caused by a massive enemy attack,” he wrote on social media.
Kyiv’s streets now relentless hum with the buzz of the diesel generators that businesses rely on for power, but many residential buildings are reliant on central heating and restoring it can be a longer task.
The targeting of power plants has become a constant feature of this war, with Ukraine increasingly responding in kind to Russia’s sustained attacks on energy infrastructure that regularly leave millions without access to electricity or heating.
On Thursday night, as Moscow’s attack on Ukraine was ongoing, half a million people in the Russian region of Belgorod were left without power following Ukrainian shelling of infrastructure, the local governor said.
Authorities also said that a Ukrainian strike on a Russian power plant in the city of Oryol, further north, affected the water and heating systems.
