Russian attack on Ternopil kills 26 in one of deadliest strikes on western Ukraine

At least 26 people have been killed including three children in a Russian missile and drone attack that hit two blocks of flats in the western city of Ternopil, Ukrainian officials say.

They say another 93 people were wounded, 18 of them children, in the strike early on Wednesday – one of the deadliest in the region since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Ukraine’s air force later said Russian X-101 cruise missiles had hit the residential flats.

The neighbouring Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk regions were also struck, and a drone attack on three districts of the north-eastern city of Kharkiv wounded more than 30 people. Photos posted online showed buildings and cars ablaze.

Ukraine’s air force said it had shot down 442 of 476 drones and 41 of 48 missiles launched by Russia, including 10 missiles destroyed by F-16 and Mirage 2000 fighter jets supplied to Kyiv by its Western allies.

But in a reference to how stretched Ukraine’s air defences currently are, the air force pleaded for “the uninterrupted and timely supply of aviation weapons from Western partners”.

Ternopil, a city closer to the Polish border than the capital Kyiv, has rarely faced attacks since the full-scale invasion. Social media footage of this strike shows missiles shooting across the sky towards the city, though very little sign of air defences reacting from the ground.

The devastation caused by the Russian strikes on Ternopil soon became clear. A video shared by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky showed one of the blocks of flats had completely caved in. Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said it had been destroyed between the third and ninth floors.

The attack had caused “significant destruction”, said Zelensky, and many victims were reported to be in the rubble. Plumes of smoke poured from windows and small fires burned outside the tenement.

A giant smoke cloud rose in the distance behind the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Ternopil, as sirens blared throughout the city.

With limited defence systems, and a vast country to defend every night, no matter how effective Ukraine becomes at shooting down Russian missiles and drones, there is always a risk some will get through – to devastating effect, as happened in Ternopil.

Energy facilities, transport and civil infrastructure were damaged elsewhere in western Ukraine.

The energy sector came under attack in Ivano-Frankivsk region where two of the three people reported wounded were children.

The head of Lviv region said an energy facility had been struck.

Russia has recently upped its attacks on Ukraine’s energy grid – as the fourth winter of the war approaches – hoping to damage morale as well as logistics and Ukraine’s own defence industry.

Electrical supplies are already being rationed and, after the latest attacks, the energy ministry announced more power cuts across the country.

Russia’s defence ministry said it had carried out its “massive strike using long-range precision weapons”, claiming it had targeted Ukraine’s “military-industrial complex and energy sector” in response to Ukrainian attacks on “civilian targets”.

Ukraine’s military said on Tuesday it had fired US-supplied longer-range Atacms missiles at military targets inside Russia, the first time they had admitted using Atacms on Russian soil.

Russia’s defence ministry accused Ukraine of firing four of the missiles at the southern city of Voronezh but said they had all been shot down by air defences.

Meanwhile, Zelensky has travelled to the Turkish capital Ankara, in an attempt to revive a US bid to end the war. He held talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan amid reports President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff has been working on a plan with Russian counterpart Kirill Dmitriev.

The Kremlin said earlier that no Russian representative would be joining the talks in Ankara.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman appeared to dismiss US media reports that Washington and Moscow had been working on a peace plan for Ukraine – without any involvement of Kyiv and its European allies.

“In this case, we have no additional innovations to what we call ‘the spirit of Anchorage’,” Dmitry Peskov told Russia’s state-run media, referring to the August summit between Putin and Trump in the US state Alaska.

Any agreements reached during the one-day meeting have not been made public.

Peskov’s comments came as Zelensky was reportedly due to meet two top US army officials in Kyiv on Thursday. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and Army Chief of Staff General Randy George are the most senior US military officials to visit the Ukrainian capital since President Donald Trump took office, Reuters reports.

In a separate development, Romania’s defence ministry said a Russian drone had flown about 8km (5 miles) through its airspace in the early hours of Wednesday. The drone then crossed into Ukraine and Moldova before returning to Romania, it said.

Romanian and German air force planes were scrambled in response to the incursion and the defence ministry said it was unclear where the drone had come down.

Poland also deployed jets early on Wednesday and temporarily closed two airports in the southeast in response to the strikes in western Ukraine.

As the fourth anniversary of the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion approaches next February, Moscow and Kyiv remain fundamentally opposed in their views of how to end the war.

Ukraine and its Western allies, including the US, have called for an immediate ceasefire along the vast front line – but Russia has repeatedly ruled that out, repeating demands that Ukraine says amount to its de facto capitulation.

Earlier this month, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow’s pre-conditions for a peace deal – including tough curbs on the size of Ukraine’s military and the country’s neutrality – had not changed since Putin laid them out two months before the full-scale invasion.