KYIV:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky vowed on Friday to launch more retaliatory strikes on Russia, a day after a Russian strike on Kyiv killed 24 people, including three children, according to officials.

Russia has shown little sign of halting its more than four years of war. Kyiv has responded with its own attacks and a drone strike on the Russian city of Ryazan earlier Friday killed four people including a child, according to officials there.

“Ukraine will not allow any of the aggressor’s strikes that take the lives of our people to go unpunished,” Zelensky said in a post on X. “We are entirely justified in our responses against Russia’s oil industry, military production, and those directly responsible for committing war crimes against Ukraine and Ukrainians.”

Earlier Friday, Zelensky visited the site of a building in Kyiv ripped apart by a Russian missile. “Here, Russia took the lives of 24 people, including three children,” Zelensky said, after walking through a courtyard littered with rubble. Two dozen people were still in hospital, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.

The scenes in Kyiv contrasted with elation in northern Ukraine, where 205 Ukrainian soldiers were freed in the latest POW exchange with Moscow. AFP reporters saw the released fighters—with shaven-heads and draped in Ukrainian flags – embracing one another and waiting to be reunited with their families.

In Russia, Ukrainian overnight drone strikes on an apartment block in the city of Ryazan—south-west of Moscow—killed four people including a child, officials said.