At least ten people were killed on Sunday as Russia and Ukraine exchanged a wave of strikes, with Russian drones and missiles hitting multiple Ukrainian cities while Ukrainian drones struck Russian-occupied territory and border regions inside Russia. The deadliest single incident in Ukraine occurred in Chernihiv, a city in the country's north, where a Russian drone struck a supermarket, killing two people including a nine-year-old girl and wounding 25 others. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the attack as a "deeply cynical drone strike on an ordinary supermarket," adding: "This is deliberate Russian terror with absolutely no military justification."
Beyond Chernihiv, Ukraine's air force reported that Russia had launched seven ballistic missiles and 136 drones overnight, targeting Kyiv, Zaporizhzhia, and Kharkiv. In Kharkiv, a major eastern city that has endured sustained bombardment, one person was killed and 16 others were injured in a daytime drone attack. In the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, a glide bomb killed one person and wounded six more. In Kyiv, a missile strike ignited a fire on the upper floors of a residential apartment block in a central district, wounding three people and leaving vehicles in flames. In Sloviansk, in the eastern Donetsk region, two employees of Ukraine's national energy company Naftogaz were killed in a Russian attack while assisting residents affected by an earlier strike.
On the Russian side, officials reported four civilians killed in a Ukrainian drone strike on Horlivka, a city in the Russian-occupied portion of the Donetsk region. A subsequent drone strike there hit an emergency vehicle, injuring three medics and another resident. In Belgorod, a Russian city close to the Ukrainian border, at least twelve people including two children were wounded in a Ukrainian drone attack. Further south, two people were killed and five wounded in Ukraine's drone strikes on Rostov-on-Don, a major Russian city near the border, with fires breaking out at multiple locations from falling drone debris.
The exchanges follow a pattern of sharply escalating civilian casualties on both sides. The United Nations recorded 1,396 civilians killed and nearly 8,000 wounded in Ukraine in the first half of 2026 alone, while 250 civilians were killed and more than 1,500 injured inside Russia over the same period. Analysts attribute the rising toll to the growing use of short-range drones, glide bombs, and intensified infrastructure strikes. Both Moscow and Kyiv maintain they do not deliberately target civilians, though the evidence on the ground continues to challenge those claims.
The latest violence comes as US-led diplomatic efforts to end the nearly four-year conflict remain stalled. Russia continues to occupy large swaths of eastern and southern Ukraine and has publicly stated its intention to seize the remainder of eastern Ukraine by force, leaving little near-term prospect of a negotiated halt to the fighting.