In a rare statement acknowledging casualties within its ranks, the Ukrainian military also said that 60 other soldiers were wounded.
A Russian missile attack on a Ukrainian military training base killed at least 12 soldiers and wounded more than 60 others on Sunday, the Ukrainian military said, in a rare statement acknowledging casualties within its ranks.
Ukraine’s military did not disclose where the strike occurred, saying in a statement only that there was not a mass gathering at the time of the attack.
“At the time the air raid alert was announced, all personnel were in shelters, except for those who may not have had time to reach it,” Vitalii Sarantsev, a spokesman for Ukraine’s Ground Forces, said in an interview with Ukrainian news media.
Ukraine’s military does not typically disclose official casualty figures, which are treated as a state secret and are a highly sensitive topic in the country.
The strike on the training base came on the eve of another round of peace talks in Istanbul, proposed by Moscow. While Kyiv had insisted it see a promised memorandum outlining Russia’s cease-fire terms before sending any officials to the talks, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine announced on Sunday that Kyiv would in fact send a delegation.
He did not say whether Ukraine had received the memorandum. In a post on social media, Mr. Zelensky said only that he had met with senior leadership and “defined our positions” ahead of the talks on Monday in Istanbul, where Defense Minister Rustem Umerov would lead Ukraine’s delegation.
Ukrainian officials have accused President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia of stalling for time in the negotiations.
Hours before the strike on the military training base, Russia launched what Ukrainian officials said was the largest combined overnight aerial assault on the country since the start of the war.
Ukraine’s Air Force said that Russia launched 472 drones and seven missiles overnight. It said that the majority of the drones and three of the incoming missiles were intercepted, but that at least 18 targets were struck. While the air force did not provide further details on what was struck, local officials in the Kyiv region said that at least 10 homes had sustained damage. The local authorities also reported damage in the Kirovohrad region of central Ukraine and in the northeastern Kharkiv region.
Russian officials, meanwhile, reported a number of Ukrainian strikes on their territory on Sunday.
Igor Kobzev, the governor of the Irkutsk region in Siberia, said in a statement that a military base in the remote region was attacked by Ukrainian drones but that only an “old building” in a nearby village had sustained damage. There was no immediate comment from Russia’s Defense Ministry.
The local authorities in the Ryazan region near Moscow and in Murmansk, a region of Russia that borders Norway, also reported coming under attack.
