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blown-out windows near one of the sites that was targeted.

Leonid, a 63-year-old local resident who used to work at the facility, said he heard three or four explosions. “There is nothing military there but they are bombing everything,” he said.

Vasyl, 43, said he heard five blasts. “People are afraid now,” he said, walking back to his damaged home with two loaves of bread.

“The Kremlin resorts to new insidious attacks. Today’s missile strikes at Kyiv have only one goal - kill as many as possible,” Ukrainian presidential adviser Mikhailo Podolyak wrote in a tweet.

Meanwhile, in the east of the country, the battle for control of Severodonetsk raged on.

The city is the largest still in Ukrainian hands in the Lugansk region of the Donbas, where Russian forces have been advancing gradually after retreating or being beaten back from other parts of the country, including Kyiv.

Lugansk regional governor Sergiy Gaiday said that Russian forces had lost ground in the city and it was now “divided in two”.

“The Russians were in control of about 70 percent of the city, but have been forced back over the past two days,” he said on Telegram. “They are afraid to move freely around the city.”

Tens of thousands of people have been killed, millions forced to flee and towns turned into rubble since Putin ordered an all-out assault on his pro-Western neighbour on February 24.

Apart from the human toll, the conflict has caused widespread damage to Ukraine’s cultural heritage.

On Saturday, Ukrainian officials reported a large Orthodox wooden monastery, a popular pilgrim site, had burnt down and blamed Russia shelling.

Moscow continues to prove “its inability to be part of the civilised world,” Culture Minister Oleksandr Tkachenko said in a statement.

Russia’s defence ministry blamed “Ukrainian nationalists” for the blaze.