Russia, Ukraine trade deadly drone attacks

Russia and Ukraine traded another wave of drone strikes overnight, both sides said on Thursday, in attacks that killed and wounded people on either side of the front line.

Moscow has carried out nightly drone and missile barrages on Ukraine since launching its invasion in February 2022, with Kiev responding with increasingly long-range strikes inside Russia as well as its own attacks on borders areas.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has rejected calls for a ceasefire and escalated his army's strikes, defying U.S. President Donald Trump's pledge of fresh weapons for Ukraine and harsh sanctions if a peace deal is not struck soon.

Russia's Defense Ministry said its air defenses shot down 122 drones overnight, most of them in border regions.

In Russia's Belgorod border region, "a woman was killed when an explosive device was dropped from a drone onto a private house," Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov wrote on Telegram.

He said three civilians had been killed a day earlier.

And in the Voronezh region, which also borders Ukraine, three teens were wounded when falling drone debris struck a building, regional governor Alexander Gusev wrote on Telegram.

Russia's strikes on Ukraine killed one person in the central city of Dnipro, Governor Sergiy Lysak said.

Russia launched 64 drones, mostly targeting the central Dnipropetrovsk region, which includes Dnipro, according to Ukraine's air force.

It said it had shot down or disabled 41 of them.

That was far down on recent nights, where hundreds of self-exploding attack drones have been fired at the country.

Ukraine also said three people were killed and at least 27 wounded in a Russian airstrike on the frontline town of Dobropillia a day earlier.

Meanwhile, Russia gave Ukraine the bodies of 1,000 soldiers yesterday as part of an agreement reached at peace talks last month, Moscow's top negotiator said on social media.

Two rounds of negotiations in Istanbul between Moscow and Kiev have failed to result in any progress towards a ceasefire, instead yielding large-scale prisoner exchanges and deals to return the bodies of killed soldiers.

"Following the agreements reached in Istanbul, another 1,000 bodies of Ukrainian soldiers were handed over to Ukraine today," Russian negotiator and Kremlin aide Vladimir Medinsky said on Telegram.

Ukraine handed over 19 killed Russian soldiers, he added.

He posted photos showing people in white medical suits lifting white body bags from the back of refrigerated trucks.

Exchanges of captured soldiers and the repatriation of remains have taken place regularly throughout the conflict in some of the only successful diplomacy between the sides.

At the talks last month, Russia outlined a list of hardline demands, including for Ukraine to cede more territory and to reject all forms of Western military support.

Kiev dismissed them as unacceptable ultimatums and has questioned the point of further negotiations if Moscow is not willing to make concessions.