Three killed in Ukraine a day after drone attack kills child in Moscow

Russia has renewed its strikes on Ukraine, killing three people including an eight-year-old girl, Ukrainian officials said.

The Russian strikes on Friday come a day after Ukraine launched its biggest-ever drone attack on Moscow, killing a different eight-year-old girl and sparking an inferno at a major oil refinery, according to Russian officials.

The Kremlin said on Friday it would “continue” striking Ukraine following that attack.

Between late Thursday and early Friday, Russia launched 90 drones at Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian air force.

“An eight-year-old girl was killed. Another person was wounded. These are the consequences of this morning’s enemy attack on Pavlohrad,” Oleksandr Ganzha, the governor of Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region, said.

Separate Russian attacks on Ukraine’s southern Odesa region killed one person, while strikes on the eastern city of Kramatorsk killed one other, according to authorities.

Russian drone attacks late on Thursday killed one person and wounded five others on civilian ships in the Black Sea, Ukraine said.

Both sides have escalated attacks on each other in recent weeks, as United States-led talks on ending the more than four-year conflict remain effectively frozen.

Kremlin acknowledges Ukrainian attack on ⁠Moscow

The governor of the Moscow region said on Friday that an eight-year-old girl had been killed in ‌a massive Ukrainian attack that hit the capital and surrounding area a day earlier.

Andrei Vorobyov said, “At the time of the incident, she was at home with her grandmother, who was unharmed.

The attack, using hundreds of drones, set fire, for the second time in three days, to a large oil refinery in southeast Moscow.

“Indeed, drone attacks continue. Appropriate measures ‌are being ‌taken to mitigate the consequences,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in a briefing with journalists on Friday.

Asked if Russia’s President Vladimir Putin had seen footage of the burning refinery, Peskov told reporters they should check out images from Ukrainian cities that Russian forces had struck.

The Kremlin acknowledged the Ukrainian strikes in a briefing with journalists on Friday, but said Moscow’s air defences “were performing well” and that Moscow’s own strikes on Ukraine were “impressive”.

“These strikes [on Ukraine] will continue,” spokesman Peskov said, according to Russian news agencies.

Ukraine insists its strikes targeting Russia are fair retaliation for attacks on its own civilians.