Twelve miners killed by Russian strike in Ukraine, energy company says

Twelve miners have been killed by a Russian drone strike in eastern Ukraine, the country's largest private energy firm has said.

DTEK said a bus carrying workers after a shift in the Dnipropetrovsk region had been targeted in Sunday's attack. At least seven people were injured.

Earlier, at least two others were killed and nine injured in separate Russian attacks overnight and on Sunday.

The victims included six people hurt when a drone hit a maternity hospital in Zaporizhzhia. Two were women giving birth at the time of the strike.

In a post on Telegram, Zaporizhzhia regional head Ivan Fedorov called it further "proof of a war directed against life".

BBC Verify confirmed the site was Maternity Hospital No.3 on Bocharova Street in the east of the city.

Footage shared across social media carried the watermarks of national and local administrations and showed offices, rooms with beds for patients, and a children's room with the windows broken and covered in debris.

Some footage showed degrees of fire damage, while two videos showed a fire still burning on the first storey. Another showed fire fighters breaking down interior doors and ferrying patients away.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha said the hospital attack showed Russian President Vladimir Putin was pursuing a "war against civilians contrary to peace efforts".

Fedorov later reported three people had been injured by a separate strike in a residential area.

After the strike on the DTEK bus in the town of Ternivka, the company said 15 miners had been killed. It later revised the death toll down to at least 12.

Elsewhere, a man and a woman were killed by a drone strike in the central city of Dnipro, Ganzha said. He also reported that a 72-year-old man had been injured in Nikopol.

Separately, a 59-year-old woman was seriously wounded by shelling in Kherson, while three others were injured in a strike in Kharkiv, officials said.

Moscow launched a wave of targeted attacks on Ukraine's power grid in January, leaving millions without heating or electricity during an extraordinarily cold winter - with temperatures forecast to plunge below -20C in places this weekend.

US President Donald Trump had said on Thursday that Putin had agreed to halt attacks during the cold - the Kremlin later said the pause would expire on Sunday.

Also on Sunday, Ukraine said it was working with Elon Musk's SpaceX to stop Moscow using the firm's Starlink satellite system for drone attacks.

Kyiv's military relies on the system for internet connection, but said this week it had found Starlink terminals on long-range drones used by Russia.

Musk said steps to stop the "unauthorised" use appeared to have worked, while Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov thanked him for being "a true friend of the Ukrainian people".

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said a second round of three-way talks to end the fighting - nearly four years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine - would begin on Wednesday, rather than Sunday as had been planned.

He did not give a reason for the delay, and said the talks between Russian, Ukrainian and US officials would take place in Abu Dhabi.

Negotiations on a peace plan have for months been mediated by the US, with a key sticking point being Ukraine ceding territory to Russia.

Moscow currently controls around a fifth of Ukraine, including most of the eastern Donbas region. It wants Kyiv to hand over the areas of the Donbas it has not yet taken by force, while Ukraine reportedly wants Russia to hand back control of its largest nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia.

Additional reporting by Richard Irvine-Brown, BBC Verify