A Russian missile strike on the western Ukrainian city of Ternopil killed at least 25 people on Wednesday, including three children, hours before President Volodymyr Zelensky met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Ankara to revive stalled peace efforts.
The strike destroyed the upper floors of a Soviet-era apartment building in a part of Ukraine far from the front line, marking one of the deadliest attacks in the region since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022.
Ukraine’s interior ministry said 75 people were wounded, including 15 children.
Emergency workers used cranes to reach upper floors and pulled bodies from the rubble as thick smoke covered nearby streets.
Local officials said fires triggered by the explosions caused chlorine levels in the air to rise to six times above normal and urged the city’s 200,000 residents to stay indoors.
Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched more than 476 drones and 48 missiles overnight and claimed to have intercepted most of them.
Officials also reported at least 46 wounded in the northeastern Kharkiv region and strikes in other parts of western Ukraine.
Romania said it scrambled fighter jets after detecting a Russian drone entering its airspace, and Moldova reported an overnight airspace breach of its own.
Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiga said the “horrific killing” would be raised at the United Nations Security Council meeting in New York on Thursday and accused Moscow of attacking civilians while talking about peace.
Zelensky traveled to Turkey on Wednesday for talks aimed at restarting diplomatic contacts that have yielded little progress in recent months.
He said he and Erdoğan would discuss “the best ways to ensure Ukraine achieves a just peace.”
A senior Ukrainian official told Agence France-Presse that the main goal of the Ankara meeting was to secure renewed engagement from the United States.
Those hopes dimmed after a US official said President Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, would not attend the talks.
Ukrainian officials had previously said Washington could pressure Moscow to negotiate by imposing additional sanctions and offering political guarantees.
The Kremlin said no Russian representative would join the Ankara discussions but repeated that it remained open to talks under its terms.
Trump has sought to use his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin to broker an end to the war but has not achieved a breakthrough.
Russian forces continue to make slow territorial gains, and Putin has demanded that Kyiv give up more land and end military cooperation with Western governments if it wants the invasion to stop.
Turkey maintains open channels with both governments and has hosted several rounds of contact between Russia and Ukraine this year, though these meetings have resulted only in prisoner exchanges and the return of bodies of killed soldiers.
© Agence France-Presse