A Russian attack killed five and injured fourteen in Ukraine’s southeastern Zaporizhzhia region, the regional governor said on Telegram yesterday.

Ivan Fedorov said Russia attacked the region with air strikes, drones and shelling, damaging infrastructure, residential buildings and cars.

A Ukrainian drone strike on a passenger train killed the assistant driver and wounded the driver, a Moscow-backed official said yesterday. Moscow and Kyiv have intensified drone strikes on each other in recent months as US-led diplomatic efforts to end the war, now in its fifth year, remain stalled, reports AFP.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky received the backing of the leaders of the UK, France and Germany in calling for direct ceasefire talks between the warring parties, following a meeting in London on Sunday.

Sergey Aksyonov, the Moscow-installed head of the Crimea region, wrote on Telegram that an “enemy drone strike” had killed the assistant driver and wounded the driver of a passenger train on the route between Moscow and Simferopol in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula which Russia annexed in 2014.

Meanwhile, French Nato jets stationed in the Baltic states shot down a drone in Latvia, the military and the country’s foreign minister confirmed yesterday morning.

The incident was the first time that the alliance’s rapid reaction Baltic Air Policing mission has shot down a stray drone in Latvia.

A drone crashed and exploded in eastern Moldova without causing injuries, authorities said yesterday, the most recent such incident in the country neighbouring war-torn Ukraine.