Russia has pounded Kyiv with ballistic missiles and Ukraine has sent hundreds of drones towards Moscow as the warring sides keep up a barrage of attacks despite the latest US push to end the conflict.
Russia said on Wednesday it was ready to resume US-mediated talks with Ukraine next month, after President Vladimir Putin hosted US envoy Steve Witkoff for talks in St Petersburg.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he hoped negotiations, which would be the first since February, would take place early in November.
Ukraine said Russia fired at least 21 ballistic missiles in three waves, and Zelenskiy said three of them carried cluster munitions - "bomblets" that disperse over a wide area and are banned by many countries because of the danger they pose to civilians.
Zelenskiy said that one of them struck Kyiv's historical district, hitting the area near the monastic buildings of Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra.
Russia's defence ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Russia said Ukraine launched 630 drones towards Moscow during the night.
The two sides held an exchange of war dead, with Russia handing over 252 bodies and Ukraine handing over 25, according to the Belta state news agency in neighbouring Belarus.
Such exchanges have accompanied moves towards talks in the past.
But while Witkoff spoke of "some degree of momentum" after meeting Zelenskiy and European and NATO officials in Oslo earlier in the week, the Kremlin expressed doubts.
"The Americans sensed some new nuances (in Oslo) and told us about this. But these nuances, so to speak, do not entirely satisfy us," Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said.
A senior Russian official, briefed on the results of the Putin-Witkoff talks, said they were relatively short and not substantive.
The US brought a set of proposals drafted in Norway and handed them to Putin for review, the person said.
Another source close to the Kremlin said the US proposals included a scenario where Ukraine would cede all of its Donbas region to Russia in return for receiving a guarantee of its future security from NATO.
Ukrainian authorities on Thursday ordered all families with children to leave the eastern cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk in Donbas.
"The security situation is steadily deteriorating," Vadym Filashkin, governor of the Donetsk region, posted on Telegram on Thursday.
"The Russians are attacking Kramatorsk and Slovyansk on a daily basis and shelling residential areas, civilian transport and places where people are gathered," he wrote.
Staying there with children was an unjustifiable risk, Filashkin said.
Russia says it launched the war in part to prevent Ukraine from joining the NATO military alliance.
It has repeatedly said it would not end fighting unless Ukraine cedes more land, limits the size of its forces and is permanently barred from forming alliances.
Ukraine, which says the invasion was an unprovoked war of conquest, has long dismissed Russia's conditions as a demand for capitulation that would leave it defenceless against future Russian attacks.
with DPA
