KYIV (Reuters) -Russia launched missiles and drones targeting Ukraine early on Monday, waking up Kyiv and the eastern half of the country, hours after the one-day Easter ceasefire declared by Russian President Vladimir Putin came to an end.
There were no immediate reports of injuries or major damages from the attacks, regional Ukrainian officials said on social media.
Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched 96 drones and three missiles in overnight attacks targeting Ukraine, causing damage in the Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Cherkasy regions.
Air defence units shot down 42 Russian drones, and another 47 drones were redirected by electronic warfare.
Both Kyiv and Moscow had accused each other of thousands of attacks that violated the truce that the Kremlin indicated on Sunday would not be extended.
Washington said it would welcome an extension of the truce, and President Volodymyr Zelenskiy reiterated several times Ukraine’s willingness to pause strikes for 30 days in the war.
But Putin, who launched Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and who ordered on Saturday the halt in all military activity along the front line until midnight Moscow time (2100 GMT) on Sunday, did not give orders to extend it.
“There were no other commands,” Russia’s TASS state news agency cited Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying when asked whether the ceasefire could be prolonged.
Zelenskiy said early on Monday that his forces were instructed to continue to mirror the Russian army’s actions.
“The nature of Ukraine’s actions will remain symmetrical: ceasefire will be met with ceasefire, and Russian strikes will be met with our own in defense. Actions always speak louder than words,” he said on social network X.
While eastern Ukraine was placed under air raid alerts starting minutes after midnight on Monday that are yet to be called off, according to data from the Ukrainian air force, Kyiv and the central regions were placed on alert for about an hour, starting at 0140 GMT.
There were no reports of strikes on the Ukrainian capital, but officials in the port city of Mykolaiv said that it had been hit by Russian missiles. There were no immediate reports of damages.
Russia’s Voronezh region that borders Ukraine was also under air raid alerts for two hours overnight, and the borders regions of Kursk and parts of Belgorod were briefly under missile threat as well, regional officials said.
While there were no air raid alerts in Ukraine on Sunday, Ukrainian forces reported nearly 3,000 violations of Russia’s own ceasefire with the heaviest attacks and shelling seen along the Pokrovsk part of the frontline, Zelenskiy said earlier on Monday.
Russia’s defence ministry said on Sunday that Ukrainian forces had shot at Russian positions 444 times and said it had counted more than 900 Ukrainian drone attacks, saying also that there were deaths and injuries among the civilian population.
Reuters could not independently verify the battlefield reports.
U.S. President Donald Trump, hoping to clinch a lasting peace deal, struck an optimistic note Sunday, saying that “hopefully” the two sides would make a deal “this week” to end the conflict.
On Friday, Trump and his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, said the U.S. would walk away from peace efforts unless there are clear signs of progress soon.
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne and Pavel Polityuk in Kyiv; Editing by Kim Coghill and Saad Sayeed)
