Moscow said its forces hit what it called military plants in retaliation against attacks on Russian civilian infrastructure.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Thursday that Russia would “continue to increase pressure on the Kyiv regime in order to achieve our set goals”.

Ukraine accused Moscow of targeting civilian areas and said it would be wrong to equate the actions of the “aggressor and a country defending itself”.

Children were among the “significant number” of casualties, Tymur Tkachenko, the head of Kyiv’s ​military administration, said.

“The enemy is once again deliberately targeting residential areas and killing civilians,” he said early on Thursday.

Kyiv’s metro authorities said 52,500 people, including 4,500 children, sheltered in underground stations overnight, which they said was the highest number in “recent years”.

Among the places hit by the strikes was a high-rise block of flats on the city’s left bank, in Darnitskyi district in south-east Kyiv, where two missiles caused devastation.

One missile left a giant crater next to a kindergarten and the buildings all around have been gutted by fire, their metal balconies twisted.

The second missile landed a few steps away and hit the end of a nine-storey block of flats. It has collapsed, sliding off the face of the building, into a heap of concrete. One local told the BBC that several people were missing and they may have been sheltering in the basement.

There are smashed cars, shattered windows and a thick layer of grey ash coating everything and everyone.

Rescuers have been trying to dig through the rubble to reach them as relatives watch, in tears.

Svitlana, who lives next to the building that was hit, told the BBC she was hiding in the corridor during the air raid and heard the explosions.

“It wasn’t scary,” she shrugged, “because I’ve been through it all before.” She then revealed that she had been badly injured in another Russian strike on another town which killed her mother. Two years later, her son was killed in action fighting for Ukraine.

Oleksiy, his face covered in cuts and blood, told the BBC he had stepped outside to smoke after he heard the first missile, then the second one landed and he was hit by flying glass.

“This is not retaliation by Russia for Ukrainian strikes,” he said, dismissing Moscow’s explanation for its latest attack. “They started this war. This is a residential area. And they targeted it.”