The latest round of Russian missile assaults marked the beginning of March.
As Kiev announced it was almost ready to launch a massive assault to retake occupied land, at least 25 civilians have been killed in a wave of Russian missile attacks on Ukrainian cities.
The early hours of Friday saw the first significant airstrikes in over two months, targeting the cities of Dnipro and Uman.
Firefighters battled a fire at a home damaged by a Russian missile in the centre town of Uman, and rescuers waded through a mountain of burning wreckage looking for survivors and dead as concerned bystanders watched in horror.
According to officials, four children were among the at least 23 people who died there.
Rescue personnel carried a body away on a stretcher as they waded over a sizable mound of burning debris. While he was watching, a man with a face mask started to cry, and a woman went to console him.
Serhii Lubivskyi, 58, who survived in a seventh-floor flat, claimed, "No one is left." He and his wife fled to a balcony where they were rescued by firefighters when their front door was blocked by the explosion.
Lubivskyi sobbed as he inhaled deeply from his cigarette and stared up at the gaping holes in the structure where the nearby apartments had been destroyed by explosions. My neighbours have moved out. Nothing remains," he declared. Only the kitchens remained intact.
According to the Ukrainian authorities, the strike was carried out by one of the "23 cruise missiles and so-called kamikaze drones that Russia fired in the early hours of Friday morning," Charles Stratford of Al Jazeera said from Kyiv. According to reports, some of them were fired as far away as the Caspian Sea, he stated.
He said that the assaults demonstrate "Russia's capacity to strike targets throughout this country whenever and wherever it pleases." The midnight barrage of Russian missile strikes was the first since early March. For the majority of the winter, Russia carried out these attacks almost weekly, but as spring arrived, they began to decline as Western nations alleged that Moscow was out of missiles.
Voyager missiles
A Russian installed official claimed seven people, including a child, had been killed by Ukrainian shelling that hit a minibus closer to the battlefield in Donetsk, an eastern city that has been held by Russian proxies since 2014.
Reuters was unable to independently confirm the death toll or the perpetrators. An inquiry for comment was not immediately answered by Ukrainian officials.
Out of the 23 cruise missiles fired by Russia, the Ukrainian military claimed to have destroyed 21 of them.
In a Telegram message that included pictures of the devastation, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated, "This Russian terror must face a fair response from Ukraine and the world." The answer is "And it will."
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