3 dead, 21 injured in Russian drone and missile attacks on Kharkiv

A large Russian drone and missile attack targeted Ukraine Second largest city in Kharkiv On Saturday, killing at least three people and injuring 21 others, according to local officials, while hopes of peace still fell.

The sides at war also accused of having tried to sabotage a exchange of planned prisoners, almost a week after Kyiv embarrassed the Kremlin with a Surprising drone attack on military aerodromes deep in Russia.

The Saturday’s dam – the last almost daily daily attacks against Ukraine – included air sliding bombs that were part of a fierce Russian assault in the total war, which began on February 24, 2022.

While firefighters and emergencies rushed around the attack sites in Kharkiv, the residents described the strikes that damaged their homes and almost took their lives on Saturday morning.

Alina Belous said she tried to turn off the flames with buckets of water to save a young girl trapped inside a fire building who had called for help.

“We were trying to turn it off with our buckets, with our neighbors. Then the rescuers arrived and started to help us turn off the fire, but there was smoke and they feared that we could not stay there. When the ceiling started to fall, they brought us out,” she said.

Local resident Vadym Ihnachenko said he thought that it was a neighboring building in flames.

“But when we saw sparks from the summit, we realized that it was our building,” he said.

Ukraine’s Air Force said Russia has struck 215 missiles and drones overnight, and that the Ukrainian air defenses have shot 87 drones and seven missiles.

Several other regions of Ukraine have also been struck, including the Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa and the City of Ternopil regions, said Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha in a post X.

“To put an end to the murder and destruction of Russia, more pressure on Moscow is necessary, as are more steps to strengthen Ukraine,” he said.

The Russian Defense Ministry said on Saturday that its forces had made a night strike on Ukrainian military targets, including ammunition deposits, drone assembly workshops and weapon repair stations. There was no comments from Moscow on victims reports in Kharkiv.

The mayor of Kharkiv, Ihor Terekhov, said that the strikes also damaged 18 buildings of apartments and 13 private houses. Terekhov said that it was “the most powerful attack” against the city since the start of the large -scale invasion of Russia.

Kharkiv regional governor Oleh Syniehubov said that two city districts were struck with three missiles, five air bombs and 48 drones. Among the injured, there were two children, a little boy and a 14-year-old girl, he added.

Six people are said to be trapped under the rubble of an industrial installation in the Kharkiv Kyiv district, Kharkiv’s prosecutor’s office said in a statement on Telegram. Contact with the trapped people has been lost and rescue attempts have been underway since the beginning of the afternoon, he said, without appointing the establishment.

In the province of Dnipropetrovsk further south, two women, aged 45 and 88, were injured, local governor Serhii Lysak said.

Meanwhile, the Russian Defense Ministry said that its forces shot down 36 Ukrainian drones overnight, in the south and west of the country, including near the capital. Drone debris injured two civilians in the suburbs of Moscow, local governor Andrei Vorobyov reported.

On Friday, Russia struck six Ukrainian territories, killing at least six people and injuring around 80. Among the dead, three emergency speakers in kyiv, one in Lutsk and two people in Chernihiv.

A diplomatic push led by the United States for a regulation brought two cycles of direct peace talks between the delegations of Russia and Ukraine, although the negotiations have not allowed significant breakthroughs. The parties remain far from their conditions for the end of the fighting.

Ukraine offered an unconditional 30-day ceasefire and a meeting between its Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and its Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to break the dead end. But the Kremlin actually rejected a truce and did not move its requests.

President Donald Trump said this week that Putin told him that Moscow would answer At the attack of Ukraine against Russian military aerodromes on June 1.

Trump also said that it would be better to leave Ukraine and Russia “fight for a while” before separating them and continuing peace. Trump’s comments were a remarkable detour to his often stated calls to stop the war and reported that he could abandon recent peace efforts.

Later on Saturday, Russia and Ukraine each accused the other of endangering plans to exchange 6,000 bodies of soldiers killed in combat, agreed during direct talks in Istanbul on Monday who, otherwise, did not progress to end the war.

Vladimir Medinsky, an assistant from Putin who led the Russian delegation, said Kyiv called an imminent end of the last minute. In a telegram post, Medinsky said that refrigerated trucks carrying more than 1,200 Ukrainian troops in Russia had already reached the border exchange site when the news arrived.

In response, Ukraine said Russia played “dirty games” and manipulated the facts. According to the main Ukrainian authority dealing with these Swaps, no date had been set to replace the bodies. In a statement on Saturday, the agency also accused Russia of submitting lists of prisoners of war for repatriation which did not correspond to the agreements concluded on Monday.

It was not immediately possible to reconcile contradictory claims.

The talks on Monday took place one day after a series of superb long -range attacks on both sides, Ukraine launching the assault of devastating drones on the Russian air bases, and Moscow launching its greatest drone drone attack on Ukraine.

Ukraine’s security service released a video indicated on Saturday to show its daring attack on the Russian air fields on Sunday in which kyiv said that 41 Russian military planes had been destroyed.

The video shows the flight trajectory of a first -person view of explosives, or FPV, takeoff of the roof of a modular building in the field of Air Belaya – where it seems to strike a Russian strategic bomber. Other planes are seen engulfed in the flames, apparently previous successes in “Operation Spiderweb” of Ukraine.

A previous series of negotiations in Istanbul, the first time that the Russian and Ukrainian negotiators have been seated at the same table since the first weeks of the large -scale invasion, led 1,000 prisoners on both sides exchanged.