Seven people including a six-year-old child have been killed and 90 wounded after a Russian missile struck a central square in the historic northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv.
People had been on their way to church on Saturday to celebrate a religious holiday when the strike took place, the interior ministry said, adding 12 of the wounded were children and 10 were police officers.
"A Russian missile hit right in the centre of the city, in our Chernihiv," President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who was on a working visit to Sweden, posted on Telegram.
"A square, the polytechnic university, a theatre.
"An ordinary Saturday, which Russia turned into a day of pain and loss."
A short video accompanying Zelenskiy's post showed debris scattered across a square in front of the regional drama theatre, where parked cars were heavily damaged.
One body could also be briefly seen in the video slouched inside a car.
Chernihiv is a city of leafy boulevards and centuries-old churches about 145 kilometres north of the capital Kyiv.
The interior ministry said the roof of the drama theatre had been destroyed in the strike.
Russia has attacked Ukrainian cities far from the front line with missiles and drones as part of the invasion it launched in February last year.
Kyiv's air force said early on Saturday the Ukrainian military had shot down 15 out of 17 Iranian-made Shahed drones launched by Moscow in an overnight strike.
The attack comes after Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the commander of Moscow's operation in Ukraine and other top military brass.
"Vladimir Putin held a meeting at the headquarters of the special military operation group in Rostov-on-Don," the Kremlin said in a statement on Saturday.
The Kremlin added that Putin, Russia's supreme commander-in-chief, listened to reports from Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the General Staff of the Army in charge of Moscow's operations in Ukraine, and other top military commanders and officers.
The Kremlin did not provide any additional details of the meeting but videos published by the RIA state news agency showed Gerasimov greeting Putin in what appeared to be night-time and leading him into a building after a brief handshake.
Gerasimov, who has been seen rarely in public in recent months, had been the target of savage criticism from Wagner mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin and some Russian military bloggers over Russia's failings in the war.
Rostov-on-Don, a city some 100 kilometres from Ukraine's border, is home to the Russian southern military district command whose army is fighting in Ukraine.
