They also briefly forced Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant off the grid.

“The occupiers can only terrorise civilians. That’s all they can do. But it won’t help them. They won’t avoid responsibility for everything they have done,” said Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

Russia’s defence ministry said it had carried out a “massive retaliatory strike” as payback for a cross-border raid last week. It claimed to have hit all its intended targets, destroying drone bases, disrupting railways and damaging facilities that make and repair arms.

Villagers in Zolochiv in Ukraine’s western Lviv region carried a body in a black plastic bag over the rubble of a brick house completely destroyed by a missile. They put the body into the back of a white van with two others, of at least five people killed there.

​Oksana Ostapenko said the house belonged to her sister Halyna, whose body was still buried under the rubble with two other family members.

“They still haven’t found them. We were hoping that they’re alive. But they’re not alive,” she said.

Another civilian was reported killed by the missiles in the central Dnipro region. Three civilians were separately reported killed by artillery in Kherson.

Moscow says such hits are intended to reduce Ukraine’s ability to fight. Kyiv says the air strikes have no military purpose and aim to harm and intimidate civilians, a war crime.

In the capital Kyiv, a seven-hour alert through the night was the longest of Russia’s five-month air campaign.
Moscow confirmed it had used hypersonic Kinzhal – Russian for dagger – missiles in the attack. Ukrainian officials said it was the first time they had faced so many of the weapons, which Ukraine has no way to shoot down. Russia is believed to have just a few dozen Kinzhals, which fly many times faster than the speed of sound and are built to carry nuclear warheads with a range of more than 2,000 km.

In his speeches, president Vladimir Putin regularly touts the Kinzhal as a weapon for which the transatlantic Nato alliance backing Kyiv has no answer.

Ukraine said the attacks had also knocked out the power supply to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, severing it from the Ukrainian grid and forcing it onto emergency diesel power to prevent a meltdown. It was later reconnected to Ukraine’s energy grid, operator Ukrenergo said.

The plant, which Russia has held since capturing it early in the war, is near the front line and both sides have warned in the past of a potential for disaster. Moscow said it was safe.

United Nations nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi appealed for a protection zone around the plant.

“Each time we are rolling a dice. And if we allow this to continue time after time then one day our luck will run out,” Mr Grossi told the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) board of governors.

Kyiv, the Black Sea port of Odesa and the second-largest city Kharkiv were all hit. Targets stretched from Zhytomyr, Vynnytsia and Rivne in the west to Dnipro and Poltava in central Ukraine, officials said.
On the battlefield, the week has seen an apparent shift as Ukraine has decided to fight on in Bakhmut, a small city that has borne the brunt of a winter offensive in the
bloodiest fighting of the war. Moscow says Bakhmut is strategically important as a step to securing the surrounding Donbas region. The west says the ruined city has little value and Russian generals are sacrificing lives to give Putin his only victory since sending hundreds of thousands of reservists into battle at the end of last year.

Ukraine had appeared likely to withdraw from Bakhmut, but commanders now say they are inflicting enough damage on Russia’s assault force to justify staying and fighting on.

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