Sawt Falasteen - Russia pounds Ukraine's Dnipro for 20 hours straight, killing eight

The attack -- the largest ever on the city -- began overnight and lasted well into the afternoon, coming in waves that hit homes, businesses and energy infrastructure.

"20 hours... For more than 20 awful hours, the Russians attacked Dnipro in waves. They struck with missiles and drones," said mayor Borys Filatov, describing it as "the largest-scale attack on Dnipro".

Rescuers spent hours sifting through debris despite the ongoing strikes, clearing out the rubble of bombed apartment buildings and searching for survivors and bodies, photos from the Ukrainian emergency service showed. One apartment building was struck twice at different times, authorities said.

The attack killed eight people and wounded 49, including two children. Among the wounded was the mayor's deputy, who was "nearly killed", Filatov said. Another ten people were wounded in the wider Dnipropetrovsk region.

Strikes also hit the neighbouring Zaporizhzhia region, killing one person and wounding four in a civilian minibus, said regional military administration head Ivan Fedorov.

Ukraine's air force said Russia had launched 619 drones and 47 missiles overnight, adding that most of them had been repelled.

Russia has recently shifted from largely nighttime air raids to longer, periodic strikes that begin overnight and stretch well into the day.

- 'Massive strike' -

Russia's defence ministry said it had "launched a massive strike" on Ukrainian military targets over the past 24 hours. Moscow denies having targeted civilians throughout the four-year war.

Following the barrage, a drone crashed in Romania, a NATO and EU country bordering Ukraine, local authorities said. More than 200 people were evacuated as a precaution, and British fighter jets stationed in Romania were scrambled.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, on a visit to Azerbaijan, called for a stronger international response to Russia's attacks.

"It is important that the world does not remain silent about what is happening and that this Russian war in Europe is not overshadowed by the war in Iran," he said on social media.

"We count on the timely implementation of each of our political agreements to strengthen air defence," he added.

The industrial hub of Dnipropetrovsk lies more than 100 kilometres (60 miles) from the front line, which snakes through eastern and southern Ukraine.

Russian troops have captured a sliver of territory in the wider Dnipropetrovsk region, which is not one of the four Ukrainian regions that Moscow claimed to have annexed after its invasion.

- Attacks on Russia -

In recent months, Kyiv has stepped up its own retaliatory attacks on Russia, hitting civilians and energy infrastructure among other targets.

Ukrainian drone attacks over the past 24 hours wounded one person in Russia's Kursk region, which borders Ukraine, governor Alexander Khinshtein announced Saturday on Russia's state-sponsored messenger app Max.

The governor for Russia's neighbouring Belgorod region, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said a woman had been killed and a man seriously wounded in a drone attack on a car, and a man driving a tractor wounded in another strike.

A rare Ukrainian drone strike hit an apartment high-rise in Yekaterinburg, a large industrial city in Russia's heartland more than a thousand miles away from Ukraine, said local governor Denis Pasler. No one was seriously hurt in the attack, he added.

Three people were killed after Ukrainian drones struck a village in the Russian-occupied Lugansk region, said Moscow-installed governor Leonid Pasechnik.

On the front line in Ukraine, the Russian army claimed to have captured the village of Bochkove in the Kharkiv region.

Diplomatic efforts to end Europe's deadliest conflict since World War II are at a standstill with US mediation efforts diverted by the outbreak of the Middle East war in February.

S.Barghouti--SF-PST