At least 25 people have been killed, including three children, and nearly 100 wounded in a barrage of Russian drone and missile attacks on Ukraine.

Strikes on the city of Ternopil were the deadliest for weeks and the worst in the west of the country far from the front line since Moscow invaded in 2022.

The attack came on Wednesday as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived in Turkiye for talks on ending the war caused by Russia’s full-scale invasion two years ago.

“Every brazen attack against ordinary life shows that the pressure on Russia is insufficient. Effective sanctions and assistance to Ukraine can change this,” the president said in a social media post, calling for air defence missile aid from allies.

Russia used more than 470 drones and 48 missiles in the attack on Ukraine, Zelenskyy added.

The whole of Ukraine was under an air raid alert with authorities issuing warnings to residents as explosions rocked the western cities of Lviv and Ternopil.

In Ternopil, at least 25 people, including three children, were killed, Ukraine’s interior ministry said in a social media post. Seventy-three others were wounded.

Ukraine’s energy ministry said Russian attacks had resulted in emergency power outages in a number of regions.

The full extent of the damage was not immediately clear.

Ukrainian state media reported that a multistorey residential building had been hit in Ternopil, while a witness told the Reuters news agency that there had been power disruptions in Lviv during the attack.

Regional Governor Maksym Kozytskyi said on Telegram that the attack damaged an energy facility and hit an industrial site in the Lviv region but caused no casualties, without providing further details.

Images shared on Ukrainian news-monitoring Telegram channels showed a tower block in Ternopil with its upper floors torn away beneath a towering column of black smoke, an orange glow of fire still burning through the haze.

In the northeastern region of Kharkiv, police said an overnight attack that injured at least 36 people damaged more than 10 apartment buildings, a school, a supermarket and an ambulance substation, among other buildings.

Ukraine fires US-made missiles

Moscow has been intensifying its daily drone and missile barrages in recent months, targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and hitting a number of civilian sites.

Zelenskyy, who has been completing a short tour to visit Kyiv’s strongest European allies, including Turkiye, has said he hopes to acquire additional air defences to counter these attacks.

On Monday, he signed an accord in France with President Emmanuel Macron that provides for Kyiv to acquire up to 100 fighter jets and other hardware, including drones.

Following Russia’s latest strikes, neighbouring Poland briefly closed its Rzeszow and Lublin airports in the southeast of the country, according to the Polish Air Navigation Services Agency.

Polish military commanders said earlier that Polish and allied aircraft were scrambled because of Russian attacks on facilities located in Ukraine.

Poland and its allies have been reinforcing air defences amid increasing Russian drone activity. Last month, Warsaw deployed additional systems along its border with Ukraine, which stretches for about 530km (330 miles).

Oleksiy Goncharenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker, said Russia has been attacking civilian infrastructure in western Ukraine since the beginning of the war. The country needs more missile defence systems to counter the strikes, Goncharenko said.

“Ukraine is a huge country and it is unfortunately impossible to completely stop [all the] missiles or drones,” he told Al Jazeera.

“We are intercepting part [of them] but we definitely need more weapons, more systems, more air defence – that is what we are asking from our allies, and that’s very important.”

Ukraine’s alleged attacks on Russia

Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces fired four US-made ATACMS missiles in Russia’s southern city of Voronezh on Wednesday in an attempted strike on civilian targets, according to Russia’s defence ministry.

“Russian S-400 air defence crews and Pantsir missile and gun systems shot down all ATACMS missiles,” the ministry said on Telegram.

Falling debris from the destroyed missiles damaged the roofs of a Voronezh retirement home and an orphanage, as well as one house, it said, adding there were no casualties.

The ministry published pictures of pieces of the missiles and said air reconnaissance forces identified the Kharkiv region as the location of the ATACMS launch.

Ukraine’s military said on Tuesday it attacked military targets in Russia with the US-supplied missiles, calling it a “significant development”.

Kyiv received the systems in 2023 but was initially restricted to using them only on its own territory, nearly one-fifth of which is controlled by Russia.

Ukraine previously attacked Russian areas with the ATACMS missiles in January, firing six projectiles on its Belgorod region.