Russia launches 948 drones at Ukraine in largest attack over 24-hour period

Russia has launched the largest aerial attack on Ukraine over a 24-hour period since the war began, hitting cities across the country with 948 drones.

More than 400 drones were fired on Tuesday afternoon alone, in an unusual daytime attack which killed and injured many across western Ukraine.

Those strikes came hours after a heavy overnight attack left at least five people dead.

In Lviv, Mayor Andriy Sadovyi said 22 people in his city were injured and warned that the number would increase.

The region's head Maksym Kozytskyi said the Bernardine monastery, a 16th-Century Unesco site, was damaged. A video posted by Lviv authorities shows a fire burning through the roof of a residential building near the monastery.

Three other western cities, Ivano-Frankivsk, Vinnytsia and Ternopil, were also targeted.

The head of the Ivano-Frankivsk region, Svitlana Onyshchuk, said two people were killed. Four, including a six-year-old child, were injured. Various buildings in the city as well as the maternity hospital were damaged.

And in Vinnytsia, one person died and 11 were injured on Tuesday afternoon.

While four years of war have left virtually no corner of Ukraine untouched, the west of the country has been hit comparatively less intensely and frequently than other areas nearer the Russian border in the east.

Yurii Ihnat, spokesman of the Ukrainian Air Force, said late on Tuesday that a "large number of drones" had entered Ukrainian airspace from the north of the country, "effectively moving in columns".

"The geography of the strikes during the daytime was broader than at night... It can be said this was one of the largest attacks within a 24-hour period," he said.

Four years after Moscow launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the war continues unabated, with Russia launching near-daily attacks on cities across Ukraine.

On Tuesday, the governor of Russia's Kursk region said one man was killed and 13 people were injured in a Ukrainian drone attack on an agricultural enterprise.

Talks brokered by the US and aimed at reaching at a peace settlement have stalled since the start of US-Israeli strikes on Iran in late February.

"Amid the news the world is drowning in every day, we will not let Ukrainian grief get lost, become just another statistic, a headline that will be casually skipped over," wrote Ukraine's First Lady Olena Zelenska on social media.