At least two people were killed and more than two dozen wounded when a medical facility in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro was hit during another wave of Russian air strikes against Ukraine, which President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called "another crime against humanity."
Video from the site on May 26 showed plumes of smoke coming out of several buildings, which appeared heavily damaged and still ablaze in some parts.
Zelenskiy said the buildings housed a psychological clinic and a veterinary clinic in the city.
"Another Russian missile attack, another crime against humanity," Zelenskiy said on Twitter. "There can be no military purpose in this [attack]. It is pure terror."
Volodymyr Orlov, the deputy governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region, told a briefing that besides the two people killed, at least 25 people, including two children, were wounded in the missile attack on the health facility in Dnipro.
Dnipropetrovsk Governor Serhiy Lysak said earlier on Telegram that the two wounded children were boys aged 3 and 6.
Lysak said it had been an "extremely difficult night" of Russian strikes that also caused substantial damage to the region's civilian infrastructure.
An hourslong air-raid alert was declared on the territory of Ukraine overnight as Kyiv and several other regions were subjected to air strikes.
Most of the incoming missiles and drones were downed by Ukrainian air defenses, the military and regional officials said.
The Russian military fired 17 missiles and 31 Iranian-made attack drones on civilian and military targets, but the Ukrainian air defenses managed to shoot down 10 missiles and 23 drones, Ukraine's Air Force Command reported early on May 26.
Damage caused by falling debris was reported in Kyiv's Obolon and Shevchenkivskiy districts, but Serhiy Popko, the head of the capital's military administration, said there were no reports of injuries or casualties during the three-hour attack on the capital that started around 3 a.m. local time.
It was the 13th such attack on the Ukrainian capital this month.
The cities of Merefa and Izyum in the Kharkiv region sustained damage in the drone attack, the head of the Kharkiv regional military administration, Oleh Synyehubov said.
A Russian missile destroyed a residential building in the town of Avdiyivka, close to Bakhmut, the Donetsk region city that has been the epicenter of the war in the east, said Zelenskiy's chief of staff, Andriy Yermak.
There were no initial reports of victims, Yermak wrote on Telegram.
Humvees, Wreckage After 'Cross-Border Raid' Into Russia
On the battlefield, fighting continued in and around the eastern city of Bakhmut, the General Staff said in its daily report on May 26, again contradicting Russia's claims that it had captured the whole city.
Meanwhile, the governor of the Belgorod region in southern Russia claimed that the Ukrainian military was behind dozens of artillery and drone attacks across the border area, but he said no casualties had been reported.
And officials in Krasnodar in southern Russian said two drones damaged buildings in the city center, although no casualties were reported.
Kyiv, as usual, did not comment on the action inside Russia.
The claims of attacks inside Russia came days after an incursion into the Belgorod region from Ukraine by two self-proclaimed anti-Kremlin Russian fighter groups shocked Moscow.
On the diplomatic front, Kyiv’s agenda is now dominated by efforts to speed up the delivery of promised F-16 fighter jets, which are more sophisticated than the Soviet-made warplanes now part of its arsenal.
Ukraine's Defense Ministry on May 26 announced that, according to its calculations, it would take almost 50 F-16s aircraft to secure the country's airspace.
"Four F16 squadrons (48 aircraft) are what we need to liberate our country from the [Russian] aggressor," the ministry's press service said on Twitter.
