Russian air strikes in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro have left one person dead after attacks reported near a children’s nursery and an apartment block while there have also been explosions at airfields in two cities in the west of the country.
Three explosions early on Friday in the central Ukrainian city have killed at least one person, emergency services said.
A kindergarten and an apartment building were caught in the shelling as well as a shoe factory.
There have also been reports of explosions in western Ivano-Frankivsk and Lutsk in the north west of Ukraine, both at the cities' airfields.
Russian troops have launched a high-precision, long-range attack on two military airfields in the Ukrainian cities of Lutsk and Ivano-Frankivsk and taken them out of action, Russian news agencies quoted Russian Defence Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov as saying.
He also said that Russian forces had destroyed 3,213 Ukrainian military installations since the launch of what Russia calls a "special military operation" in Ukraine.
The Kyiv Independent wrote: "Three airstrikes by Russian forces hit residential areas in Dnipro, killing one person, according to Ukraine’s State Emergency Service.
"Explosions were reported in western Ivano-Frankivsk near its airport, according to the city’s mayor Ruslan Martsinkiv. Four explosions were also reported near an airfield in the northwestern city of Lutsk, according to the head of the Volyn Regional State Administration, Yuriy Pohulyayko."
It comes as hundreds of thousands of civilians remain trapped in Ukrainian cities, sheltering from Russian air raids and shelling despite repeated Russian promises to provide humanitarian corridors for evacuations.
The United States, together with the Group of Seven nations and the European Union, are now preparing to revoke Russia's "most favoured nation" status over its invasion of Ukraine.
On Sunday, Ukraine had warned that Russia was mustering forces to encircle Dnipro, home to about one million people before the invasion started.
Russia's defence ministry said it would declare a ceasefire on Friday and open humanitarian corridors from Mariupol as well as Kyiv, Sumy, Kharkiv, Mariupol and Chernihiv, although previous ceasefires have failed.
Officials in the besieged port of Mariupol said Russian warplanes again bombed the city on Thursday, a day after a maternity hospital was pulverised in an attack the United States said was evidence of a war crime.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the United Nations, said Washington was "working with others in the international community to document the crimes that Russia is committing against the Ukrainian people".
"They constitute war crimes; there are attacks on civilians that cannot be justified by any - in any way whatsoever," she said in an interview with the BBC.
Lavrov said the hospital struck on Wednesday had stopped treating patients and had been occupied by Ukrainian "radicals".
Russia's Defence Ministry later denied having bombed the hospital at all, accusing Ukraine of a "staged provocation".
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Thursday that Ukrainian authorities had managed to evacuate almost 40,000 people from the cities of Sumy, Trostyanets, Krasnopillya, Irpin, Bucha, Hostomel and Izyum.
