Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Thursday urged his allies to bring about "regime change" in Russia, hours after a Russian drone and missile attack on Kyiv killed 16 people, including a 6-year-old boy. The overnight strikes reduced part of a nine-story apartment block in Kyiv's western suburbs to rubble and wounded at least 150 people in the capital, authorities said. The Russian army, meanwhile, claimed to have captured Chasiv Yar, a strategically important hillside town in eastern Ukraine where the two sides have been fiercely fighting for months.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has urged its allies to stop "watching" and take steps before North Korean troops deployed in Russia reach the battlefield, and the country's army chief warned that his troops are facing "one of the most powerful offensives" by Moscow since the all-out war started more than two years ago. Zelenskyy raised the prospect of a preemptive Ukrainian strike on camps where the North Korean troops are being trained and said Kyiv knows their location. But he said Ukraine cannot do it without permission from allies to use Western-made long-range weapons to hit targets deep inside Russia. "But instead … America is watching, Britain is watching, Germany is watching. Everyone is just waiting for the North Korean military to start attacking Ukrainians as well," Zelenskyy said in a post late Friday on the Telegram messaging app. The Biden administration said on Thursday that some 8,000 North Korean soldiers are now in Russia's Kursk region near Ukraine's border and are preparing to help the Kremlin fight against Ukrainian troops in the coming days.