Ukraine has fired almost 1200 drones at Russia in one of its biggest aerial attacks since the Russian full-scale invasion nearly five years ago.
Russia's defence ministry said its forces downed 1198 Ukrainian long-range drones between late Thursday and early Friday.
However, strikes on three Russian regions killed seven people, including a 12-year-old, and wounded 17, local officials said.
Ukraine's General Staff said it hit an oil refinery in the Russian city of Volgograd, starting a fire.
The refinery has a capacity of about 110 million barrels per year, it said.
Ukrainian forces are using drones and ground robots to help defend against Russia's army along the 1200km front line snaking down eastern and southeastern Ukraine.
Russia launched 117 drones against Ukraine, killing at least two people including a 17-year-old, authorities said.
A single Russian attack on Friday on southern Zaporizhzhia hit two five-story apartment blocks and wounded 30 people, including six children, officials said.
The war has killed hundreds of thousands of soldiers and thousands of civilians, analysts and humanitarian organisations say.
Russian attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure caused widespread power outages across about half of the country's regions on Friday, First Deputy Minister of Energy Artem Nekrasov said.
Meanwhile, US and Russian negotiators raised the stakes in talks to stop the fighting by including for discussion wider European security arrangements that have been in place since the end of the Cold War.
"Russia wants to talk about questions of European security architecture. We don't need to talk about that. There is one," German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said, referring to the NATO military alliance.
After two days of talks with Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Abu Dhabi this week, US envoys went in person to brief Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who was meeting with European leaders in Dublin, Ireland.
More talks are planned as negotiators seek a breakthrough in peace efforts, according to US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.
Kushner said Russia has agreed to include European countries in upcoming talks.
Europe's presence at the negotiating table will allow negotiators "to address the broader postwar European security arrangements alongside the territorial issues between Ukraine and Russia," Kushner said on X.
As European leaders scrambled to find an envoy to the talks, they were also wary of Russian manoeuvring.
The European Union's top diplomat Kaja Kallas said the bloc must insist on a ceasefire before taking the negotiations further.
"If we start to talk about what Russia is asking regarding the security architecture, we actually walk into the traps that Russia is setting us," she said in Dublin on the sidelines of an EU summit.
with DPA
Australian Associated Press
