Russian drone and missile barrage kills civilians in Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv

A concentrated wave of Russian drones and at least one ballistic missile struck wide swaths of Ukraine overnight, killing civilians, igniting large fires and damaging critical infrastructure across several regions, officials said.

Regional emergency services in Zaporizhzhia reported three people were killed and three wounded when a drone struck a residential area. The victims were identified as two women, aged 26 and 50, and a 62-year-old man; one private building was destroyed and several others damaged, with firefighters posting images of a flattened structure and raging blaze. Zaporizhzhia’s governor, Ivan Fedorov, said that in the past 24 hours Russian forces had launched 841 strikes at 34 settlements in the region.

The strikes formed part of a wider nighttime assault in which Ukrainian air-defence units and military agencies gave differing tallies of the weapons involved. One official Ukrainian accounting said Russian forces launched an Iskander-M ballistic missile and 146 attack drones, roughly 90 of them Shahed-type, and that air defences had shot down 103 drones while the missile and 36 drones struck 22 locations. Separately, the air force provided a lower overnight count of 105 drones launched, of which 84 were downed. The discrepancy between those figures reflects multiple official tallies circulating after the barrage.

The strikes hit or damaged infrastructure in Kyiv, Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk, Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, officials reported. In Odesa a large fire broke out at an industrial facility near the port and local authorities said three people were injured. In the capital a 17-storey residential tower sustained minor roof and upper-floor window damage and several residential blocks remained without power, compounding winter hardships for millions already coping with outages.

Near Kharkiv, a drone strike on a passenger train left multiple people dead and several injured, regional prosecutors said. The strike hit close to Yazykove village on the Chop to Barvinkove route; investigators said one drone struck a carriage directly and two detonated nearby. Local prosecutors put the death toll at at least four, while other officials reported five fatalities; President Volodymyr Zelensky called the attack “purely as terrorism” and warned that such strikes undermined diplomatic efforts. “In any country, a drone strike on a civilian train would be considered in exactly the same way - purely as terrorism,” he wrote on social media. He also said the attacks discredit peace talks, noting that “every single Russian strike does.”

Ukrainian forces also reported counterstrikes against Russian military assets near the front and in Russia’s near rear. The Ukrainian General Staff said strikes struck manpower concentrations, a drone control point and an ammunition depot in Donetsk and Luhansk directions, and that long-range attacks hit an oil depot in Voronezh Oblast, where the regional governor acknowledged fires after drone strikes.

Military analysts and officials stressed the operational implications. Ukraine’s defense minister warned that Russia has intensified drone deployments, estimating that more than 6,000 drones were launched against Ukraine in the past month and saying Moscow is improving its tactics. The conflicting weapon counts and widespread damage underscore the difficulty of consolidating battlefield data during intense, multi-axis attacks and raise fresh questions about civilian protection, energy resilience and the capacity of air defences as diplomacy proceeds amid continuing hostilities.