On a Friday evening in Askaniya-Nova, a small village near Crimea, a Ukrainian drone struck a café. Rescuers who sifted through the rubble afterwards found the bodies of two young girls, born in 2004 and 2006. A man was killed in the same area. The detail is unremarkable only in the sense that it has become, across more than three years of full-scale war, numbingly routine.

At least 16 people were killed across Russia and Ukraine in a single 24-hour period ending Saturday, according to official statements from both governments — the latest toll in what has already been described as the deadliest summer since Russia launched its invasion in 2022, triggering Europe's worst armed conflict since the Second World War. Kyiv confirmed that strikes had claimed at least six lives across the Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, and Dnipropetrovsk regions, where a 17-year-old girl was among the dead. A separate drone strike damaged an apartment building in Kyiv's Solomianskyi district, a day after a daytime Russian attack on the capital killed seven people. Russia, for its part, reported four deaths from Ukrainian strikes in its Krasnodar and Belgorod regions, while Moscow-appointed officials in occupied Zaporizhzhia confirmed three further fatalities overnight.

The diplomatic backdrop offers little comfort. US-led negotiations have produced no breakthrough, and the Kremlin has continued to signal its intention to seize the remainder of eastern Ukraine. At the UN General Assembly this week, President Donald Trump again asserted that a peace deal would happen, but analysts noted that no concrete mechanism for achieving it has been put forward by any party. United Nations officials have separately warned of a steady rise in civilian casualties.