Ukraine-Russia conflict newest: Putin’s forces launch five-hour drone assault on Kyiv in certainly one of battle’s largest assaults

Russian forces struck Kyiv with high-precision weapons and drones overnight, Russia’s TASS state news agency cited the defence ministry as saying on Tuesday.

The ministry claimed it had struck military targets – but Ukraine and its allies have repeatedly cast Moscow’s definition of military targets as dubious.

The air strikes on Kyiv, among the largest in over three years of war, were part of intensified bombardments that Moscow says are retaliation for attacks by Ukrainian forces on Russia.

Ukraine says the strikes hit civilian targets and at least four people were treated in hospital.

Russia has been ready to return the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers killed in the war “for several days”, the Kremlin has claimed.

Moscow and Kyiv are still in talks on the subject, the Kremlin said

On Saturday Kremlin aide Vladimir Medinsky said the Russian side had shown up at the agreed exchange point with the bodies of 1,212 Ukrainian dead soldiers only to find nobody from Ukraine to take them.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky accused Moscow of “trying to play some kind of dirty political and information game” around the issue of the exchanges.

The exchange was agreed during a second round of direct peace talks in Istanbul on June 2. The Kremlin said it did not yet know exactly how many bodies of Russian soldiers Ukraine was ready to hand over.

Russia has been forced to observe a temporary suspension of flights at all airports serving Moscow and the country’s second-largest city St Petersburg due to an overnight drone attack by Ukraine, Russian officials reported this morning.

Russian air defence units destroyed a total of 102 Ukrainian drones overnight, the Russian defence ministry said.

Nearly half of the drones were destroyed over the Bryansk region that borders Ukraine, the ministry said. At least three drones were downed over the Moscow region and two over the Leningrad region, of which St Petersburg is the regional capital.

Russian officials only report how many were downed, not the number Ukraine launched.Russia’s civil aviation authority Rosaviatsia temporarily halted flights at all four major airports serving Moscow and St Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport as well as at airports in nine other cities to ensure safety, it said on Telegram.

Flights in Moscow and some other cities were restored by morning, but restrictions were still in place in St Petersburg at 0430 GMT.

Regional governors, who wrote about the attacks on Telegram, did not report any damage caused by the attacks.

Two people were killed after Russian drone attacks residential buildings and a hospital in the Ukrainian city of Odesa on Monday night.

Regional officials said a maternity ward was damaged in the attack, which injured 13 people in the port city.

The Kremlin has said it is in talks with Kyiv over the return of bodies of Ukrainian soldiers killed in the war.

It said some of the bodies were still waiting inside refrigerated trucks for a handover.

Russia has previously said that the trucks, initially carrying over 1,000 bodies, have been parked near an exchange point since at least Saturday for Ukraine to collect and has complained that Kyiv has not yet done so.

Such an exchange was agreed during a second round of direct peace talks in Istanbul on June 2.

World affairs editor Sam Kiley writes:

Nato chief Mark Rutte has called for a 400 per cent boost to air and missile capabilities – and his demand to raise defence spending across the alliance to 5 per cent has raised the voices of doom to a scream.

A return to Cold War levels of defence spending is not, however, a hysterical plea from a lackey of the military-industrial complex.

It is a sad acknowledgement that the peace dividend that came with the collapse of the Soviet Union has been squandered by the West in a pointless war in Afghanistan and a criminal conflict in Iraq which expanded the list of peoples with a good reason to hate democracy.

But there were plenty around already. Vladimir Putin is one of them, Xi Jinping is another – Donald Trump is rushing to their ranks. Autocracy is on the rise around the world while democracies have been consumed by complacency.

At least seven people were killed as Russia launched a barrage of drone attacks across Ukraine.

Three were killed in the eastern Donetsk region, two in the southern Odesa region, one in the southern Kherson region and one in the central Dnipropetrovsk region.

At least 34 others were injured in the mass drone strikes, local authorities reported.

Russia launched 315 drones at Ukraine overnight on Tuesday, 284 of which were shot down by Ukraine’s air force, it said on Telegram.