Twelve killed, dozens injured by Russian strikes on Ukraine

KYIV, Ukraine (AFP) - Russia launched drone and missile strikes across Ukraine on Friday, killing at least 12 people and wounding over 70 in one of the biggest air attacks of the war.

"Today Russia hit us with almost everything it has in its arsenal," President Volodymyr Zelensky said. The military said 158 missiles and drones were fired on Ukraine and 114 of them were destroyed. Ukraine is urging Western allies to maintain military support after the United States just released its final package of weaponry under existing agreements.

Russia tried to overwhelm Ukraine's air defences across most major cities, launching a wave of Shahed attack drones followed by missiles of numerous types fired from planes and from Russian-controlled territory. Buildings damaged in six cities included warehouses, a shopping mall and a maternity hospital, according to officials.

In Kyiv, AFP reporters heard several powerful explosions in the early hours of Friday. In the city's northern Podil district, a warehouse measuring around 3,000 square metres (32,300 square feet) caught fire.

At the scene there was a strong smell of burning plastic as firefighters wearing oxygen masks tackled the blaze and a huge column of black smoke billowed into the sky, an AFP reporter saw. There were believed to be 10 people trapped under the rubble, said the head of the city's military administration, Sergiy Popko. Strikes on the capital left two dead, according to the interior ministry.

The city's Lukyanivska metro station, whose platforms were being used as an air raid shelter, was damaged and its entrance closed to passengers, Popko said. Several other residential and warehouse buildings were damaged. 

Maternity hospital struck

In the central Shevchenko district, a residential building was damaged and there was also a fire in a warehouse with six believed to be injured, Popko said. Klitschko wrote on social media that there appeared to be three people still under rubble of the warehouse while three others had been rescued.

The overnight attacks came days after Ukraine struck a Russian warship in the occupied Crimean port of Feodosia in a major setback for the Russian navy. Drones and missiles struck at least five other Ukrainian cities on Friday, including Kharkiv in the northeast, Lviv in the west, Dnipro in the east and Odesa in the south, the cities' mayors and police said.

"So far we have counted 22 strikes in different districts of Kharkiv," the mayor, Igor Terekhov, said on television. "There are currently seven injured in hospital. Unfortunately one person has died." In Lviv, governor Maksym Kozytsky said that "one person was killed and three wounded". In Dnipro, the mayor, Borys Filatov, said there were injured and dead. The health ministry said that a maternity hospital in the city had been "severely damaged".

Crucial US support 

In the southern port of Odesa, a high-rise building caught fire after being struck by debris from a downed drone, the city's mayor said. "As a result of another enemy attack, one of the high-rise buildings was damaged. The fire was promptly extinguished," mayor Gennadiy Trukhanov said on social media.

Ukraine's southern command said 14 attack drones had been destroyed in the south of the country and there were no casualties reported. The attacks came after Kremlin on Tuesday acknowledged a Ukrainian missile attack had damaged one of its warships.

On Thursday, President Volodymyr Zelensky thanked the United States for releasing the last remaining package of weapons available for Ukraine under existing authorisation, as uncertainty surrounds further aid to his war-torn country. Zelensky had warned that any change in policy from the US -- Kyiv's main backer -- could have a strong impact on the course of the war.

"I thank President Joe Biden, Congress, and the American people for the $250 million military aid package announced yesterday," Zelensky said on social media. In an interview published on Friday, Christian Freuding, a German general who oversees the German army's support for Kyiv, said Russia was severely weakened but was showing greater "resilience" than Western allies had expected at the start of the war.

"We perhaps did not see, or did not want to see, that they are in a position to continue to be supplied by allies," he told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.