Russian attacks in Ukraine have killed at least 28 people, five of them children, according to Le Monde.fr. The strikes came as President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Moscow of timing a deadly hit on a residential building as a "birthday gift" to Vladimir Putin, BFM reports.
Le Monde.fr described the reports as the latest information emerging the day after the attacks. Orange Actualités also put the death toll at 28, including the five children.
Zelensky's remarks followed a strike on an apartment block, which he condemned in comments carried by BFM. The Kremlin, for its part, denounced a French missile firing, according to 20 Minutes, which reported a heavy toll from the Russian strikes.
The accounts from the outlets give a partial picture: they confirm the casualty figure and the competing accusations from Kyiv and Moscow, but do not detail where each strike landed or how the deaths were distributed across sites.
The reported death toll makes this one of the deadliest single episodes cited in the coverage, and it drew a direct response from Ukraine's president within hours. The Kremlin's complaint about a French missile strike adds a further diplomatic dimension to the exchange, with Paris now drawn into the public dispute between the two sides.
Casualty figures from active conflict zones often shift as rescue work continues and bodies are identified, and the numbers reported so far come from the outlets cited rather than from a single verified count.
What to watch next: whether officials release a consolidated casualty count and how France responds to the Kremlin's allegation.
