At least a dozen people were killed and dozens more wounded over the weekend and into Monday as Russia and Ukraine traded some of the heaviest long-range strikes of the war, with casualties reported on both sides of the border.

Belgorod region hit hardest

The deadliest single strike landed in the village of Koloskovo, in Belgorod region’s Valuysky district, about 13 miles (21 km) from the Ukrainian border. Acting regional governor Alexander Shuvaev said a Ukrainian missile strike killed at least six people and wounded four others, including a 14-year-old, early Monday. Two of the injured were treated at the scene, while two — including the child — were hospitalized. The strike destroyed a building and damaged a vehicle.

A separate drone strike overnight killed a woman in a home in the southern Astrakhan region, more than 700 miles from the front line. Regional governor Igor Babushkin said the drones had been aimed at an industrial facility, which was not damaged.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said it intercepted 205 Ukrainian drones nationwide, including over annexed Crimea, between Sunday night and Monday morning.

Ukraine also under fire

Ukraine reported its own losses. Two people were killed in Russian strikes on Kramatorsk and Sloviansk in the Donetsk region, where a fire tore through 54 market trading stalls, according to the State Emergency Service (DSNS). In the northeastern Sumy region, a man and a woman were killed in an overnight drone attack, regional head Oleh Hryhorov said.

An overnight strike on the Black Sea port of Odesa damaged a civilian, Togo-flagged vessel and injured four people. Russia’s military said it had targeted a patrol boat and fuel storage facilities in the area — part of a sustained campaign against Ukrainian port and coastal infrastructure aimed at deterring foreign shipping companies from trading with Kyiv.

Ukraine’s energy company Naftogaz said Russia had struck its facilities 13 times in the past week alone.

Saturday night’s record barrage

Monday’s toll came a day after what Russian officials called one of the largest attacks of the war on their territory: Ukraine launched roughly 822 drones at Russia overnight Saturday, some 600 of them aimed at Moscow, according to the capital’s regional governor, who described it as one of the most massive drone attacks the city has faced. Five people were killed in Russia’s southwestern Rostov region that night, a woman died in a strike on a civilian bus in Belgorod, and an 83-year-old man was killed in the Moscow region.

That barrage also struck a warehouse belonging to Wildberries, Russia’s largest online retailer, often likened to Amazon. Ukraine’s defense ministry said the strike meant seven of the company’s ten largest logistics centers had now been knocked out of action. Kyiv has repeatedly targeted Wildberries facilities since July; Maj. Gen. Vadym Skibitski, deputy chief of Ukraine’s military intelligence, told the BBC before the latest strikes that the company’s distribution network was being used to move military equipment and components for the Russian armed forces, and that long-range strikes deep inside Russia would continue. He said Ukraine does not deliberately target civilians and that some deaths on Russian soil result from air-defense debris rather than direct hits, adding that the strikes appear to be eroding public confidence in Russia’s ability to protect its own territory.

Russia’s own Saturday-night strikes on Kyiv killed at least seven people and injured more than 39, hitting a book market in the capital’s Pochayna district and a residential building elsewhere in the city. Moscow said it had targeted a FirePoint facility producing components for Ukraine’s domestically built Flamingo cruise missiles, along with a drone-parts factory. Elsewhere in Ukraine that night, a man and woman died when a guided aerial bomb hit a private house in the Zaporizhzhia region, and five more people were killed in strikes across the country.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said 13 Ukrainian regions came under attack over the past week, with Russia launching more than 1,550 attack drones, nearly 1,560 guided aerial bombs and 62 missiles.

A war with talks stalled and casualties climbing

The exchange of strikes comes with the front line largely static and diplomacy at an impasse. Rounds of US-brokered talks through 2025 and into 2026 — including sessions in Istanbul, Abu Dhabi and Florida — produced prisoner exchanges and the return of soldiers’ remains but no breakthrough on the core sticking points: the status of Crimea and the four other Russian-annexed regions, security guarantees for Ukraine, and the makeup of any ceasefire-monitoring mechanism. Washington had pushed for a deal by early summer 2026, but negotiations have since stalled again, and both sides have instead intensified missile and drone attacks — pushing the civilian death toll to its highest levels since the war’s first months in 2022.

Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and continues to control roughly a fifth of Ukrainian territory. Kyiv has sharply escalated deep-strike drone operations against Russian territory in recent weeks, even as Moscow has stepped up its own use of hard-to-intercept ballistic missiles, reportedly exploiting gaps in Ukraine’s air defenses.