Russia and Ukraine swap drone attacks as ceasefire efforts remain stalled | Russia-Ukraine war News

Russian appears to have raised the scale of hostilities as the US has become distracted with the Israel-Iran war.

Russia and Ukraine have swapped drone strikes, with at least three people reportedly killed by Moscow near the shared border.

Strikes were reported overnight on Tuesday in several areas of Ukraine, as well as in Moscow.

The attacks are the latest in a series of intensifying hostilities as the efforts of the United States to broker a ceasefire have stalled, with Russia appearing eager to take advantage, as global attention is dominated by the war between Israel and Iran.

A Russian drone attack on a village in Sumy killed an eight-year-old boy and two adults, and injured another three people, the military administration of the region said.

Drone strikes also wounded five people in Kharkiv and four others in the Dnipropetrovsk region, local authorities said.

The attacks came a day after a “massive” missile and drone strike on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv killed at least 10 people.

“The strike took the lives of people from different families,” the military administration said on Telegram regarding the Sumy attack. “They all lived on the same street. They went to sleep in their homes. But Russian drones interrupted their sleep – forever.”

Ukraine has also stepped up its drone attacks on a wide range of targets in Russia in recent months.

Russia said a Ukrainian drone had targeted a residential building in Moscow overnight, wounding two people, including a pregnant woman, and triggering a fire.

Andrei Vorobyov, governor of the Moscow region, said that the drone started a fire on the 17th floor of the building in the town of Krasnogorsk, west of the capital.

“About 100 people were evacuated from the building, including 30 children,” Vorobyov said, adding that the injured were receiving treatment at a hospital.

Russia’s air defence units destroyed 20 Ukrainian drones overnight, including two over the Moscow region, local news agencies reported, citing Russian defence ministry data.

Russia currently occupies about a fifth of Ukraine and claims to have annexed four Ukrainian regions as its own since launching its invasion in 2022 – in addition to Crimea, which it captured in 2014.

US President Donald Trump had promised to swiftly end the war while on his campaign trail, but his diplomatic attempts have not resulted in a ceasefire so far.

While Washington succeeded in bringing the two sides together for direct talks last month, little progress was made and no meetings have taken place in the last three weeks.

Kyiv has accused Moscow of deliberately sabotaging a peace deal in order to prolong its full-scale offensive and seize more territory.