A RUSSIAN drone attack on the southern Ukrainian port city of Odessa killed two women and a toddler, authorities said today, while Ukrainian long-range drones targeted Russia’s key Black Sea port for oil exports.

The Sunday night attack on Odessa badly damaged a block of flats, killing the women and the two-year-old child, officials said. Rescuers working under floodlights pulled four people from the rubble.

Eleven people were taken to hospital, including a pregnant woman and two children — the youngest under a year old, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a post on X.

Russia has pounded civilian areas of Ukraine since it invaded just over four years ago, killing more than 15,000 people, according to the United Nations.

In the southern city of Kherson, Russian shelling killed an elderly woman and three other women, aged 86, 79 and 44, taken to hospital with shrapnel wounds, concussion, blast injuries and head trauma, according to regional military administration head Oleksandr Prokudin.

Russia has also targeted Ukraine’s electricity grid, with overnight barrages hitting energy infrastructure in the Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkiv and Dnipro regions, Mr Zelensky said.

More than 300,000 households were without electricity in northern Chernihiv after distribution facilities were damaged in the attacks, according to the regional power utility.

The Ukrainian president expressed concern in a weekend interview with the Associated Press news agency that the war in the Middle East is draining stockpiles of weapons that his country needs to defend itself, especially US-made Patriot air defence systems.

Russia’s Defence Ministry said that its air defences had downed 50 Ukrainian drones overnight.

Krasnodar Governor Veniamin Kondratyev said that eight people, including two children, were injured in Ukrainian drone attacks on the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk.

Unconfirmed media reports said the drones had targeted the Sheskharis oil terminal.