Russian officials are quoted as saying that at least 26 people, including three children, were killed in a Russian missile and drone attack that hit two blocks of flats in the western city of Ternopil.

Another 93 wounded, 18 of them children, in the strike early on 19th November, is another among the deadliest in the area since Moscow began its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

The air force of Ukraine subsequently reported that the residential flats were hit by Russian X-101 cruise missiles.

The adjacent Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk were also hit, and over 30 people were injured in a drone strike on three districts of the north-eastern city of Kharkiv. The pictures that were posted on the internet displayed the buildings and cars burning.

The air force of Ukraine reported 476 missiles and 442 drones being shot down by the Russian air force, including 10 drones shot down by F-16 and Mirage 2000 fighter jets provided by the West to Kyiv.

However, in a mention of the length of Ukraine’s air defences at the moment, the air force requested the unbroken and punctual provision of the aviation arms by Western allies.

Ternopil is a city that is closer to the Polish border than the capital Kyiv, and it has hardly been attacked since the actual invasion. There is social media footage of this strike with missiles being shot across the sky towards the city, but there is very minimal evidence of air defences responding to this on the ground.

The destruction caused by the Russian attacks on Ternopil became apparent very soon. One of the blocks of flats had collapsed entirely, as shown in a video by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said it was destroyed between the third and ninth floors.

“The assault,” according to Zelensky, “had left a lot of devastation and many were reported to be trapped in the rubble. Smoke poured out of the tenement windows, and small fires were being lit outside the tenement.”

On the other side of the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help at Ternopil, there was a towering smoke cloud in the distance with sirens ringing in the city.

Having scanty defence mechanisms and a huge land to cover by shooting down Russian missiles and drones each night, no matter how efficient Ukraine may be, it will always stand a chance of shooting down some of them, with disastrous consequences, as was to be experienced in Ternopil.

Elsewhere in western Ukraine, energy facilities, transport, and civil infrastructure were destroyed.

The energy sector was also attacked in the Ivano-Frankivsk region, where two of the three people with wounds reported that they were children.

The Lviv region head claimed that an energy plant had been hit.

More recently, Russia has increased its attacks on the energy grid of Ukraine – as the fourth winter of the war comes into view – with the hope of hurting morale and also logistics and the defence industry of Ukraine itself.

Electrical power has already been put on ration and with the recent attacks, the energy ministry declared power cuts in the country.

The defence ministry of Russia claimed it had conducted its so-called mass strike with its long-range precision weapons and had struck Ukraine’s military-industrial complex and energy infrastructure in retaliation for Ukrainian strikes on civilian targets.

On Tuesday, the Ukrainian military announced that it had used the US-supplied long-range missiles, the Atacms, to hit military targets within Russia, the first time it had acknowledged having used such missiles on Russian territory.

The defence ministry of Russia accused Ukraine of launching four of the missiles in the southern city of Voronezh, but they were all intercepted by fighter jets.

Meanwhile, Zelensky has been to the Turkish capital Ankara, in a bid to resuscitate a US proposal to put an end to the war. He even engaged in negotiations with the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan after it was reported that President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff was in a plan with the Russian counterpart Kirill Dmitriev.

In the past, the Kremlin had indicated that it would not be sending any Russian delegate to the discussions in Ankara.

The spokesman of Russian President Vladimir Putin seemed to disregard the reports of US media that Washington and Moscow were discussing a peace plan concerning Ukraine, without consultation with Kyiv and its European supporters.

“In this instance, there are no further innovations, compared to what we refer to as the spirit of Anchorage,” as Dmitry Peskov, speaking to the state-run media of Russia, specified the August meeting between Putin and Trump in the US state of Alaska.

Any deals that were concluded in the course of the one-day meeting are not disclosed.

These remarks were made on the eve of Peskov as Zelensky was said to have a meeting with two top US army officials in Kyiv on Thursday. The most senior US military leadership to visit the Ukrainian capital since President Donald Trump assumed office was Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and Army Chief of Staff General Randy George, according to the reports of Reuters.

In a different incident, the defence ministry of Romania reported that a Russian drone flew approximately 8km (5 miles) in its airspace during the early hours of Wednesday. It said that the drone flew into Ukraine and Moldova and flew back to Romania.

Romanian and German air force aircraft were also scrambled in reaction to the intrusion, and the defence ministry added that it was not clear where the drone landed.

Poland also launched jets at the beginning of Wednesday and temporarily shut down two airports in the southeast to react to the attacks in western Ukraine.

With the fourth anniversary of the outset of the full-scale invasion by Russia looming next February, there is still a fundamental difference in the perceptions of Moscow and Kyiv on how the war should be terminated.

Russia has repeatedly ruled out an immediate ceasefire along the immense front line. Ukraine and its allies, including the US, have requested one, and Ukraine has been rejecting requests to do so, a step that Russia perceives as equivalent to effective surrender.

At the beginning of this month, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reported that Moscow had not altered its preconditions to a peace agreement, which included strict restrictions on the number of troops that Ukraine should have and their neutrality, since they were announced by Putin two months prior to the full-scale invasion.