Days after the US announced further military aid to Kyiv to strengthen its resistance against Moscow troops, Russian struck southern Ukraine’s coast of the Black Sea killing at least one person, as Vladimir Putin remarked earlier that the counteroffensive had failed.

Odesa’s Governor Oleg Kiper said Russian forces “fired Kalibr missiles from a submarine in the Black Sea in which a civilian guard born in 1979 died as a result of the hit. Equipment of one of the cargo terminals was damaged, and a small security building and two cars were destroyed.”

According to AFP, Russian missile attacks on the Odesa region spiked since Moscow earlier this month pulled out of a landmark deal which had allowed the safe shipment of Ukrainian grain from Black Sea ports.

The Ukrainian Air Force said Thursday that Russia launched two Kalibr missiles and eight Iranian-made Shahed drones on Ukraine overnight.

“The Kalibrs attacked port infrastructure in Odesa region,” the air force said on social media, adding “they could not be shot down.”

“But the drones were all destroyed over the western Khmelnytsky region, the eastern Donetsk region and the Dnipropetrovsk region in central Ukraine,” it said.

The majority of the drones targeted the Starokostiantyniv air base in the Khmelnytsky region, located hundreds of kilometres from the frontline, Ukraine’s air force spokesman Yuri Ignat said.

He added that the “site was also targeted the day before”.

Separately in Ukraine, one person was killed following an overnight strike on the town of Kivsharivka in the eastern Kharkiv region, governor Oleg Synegubov said.

“A hit was recorded next to a five-storey residential building. The house was damaged, a wall collapsed in one of the apartments,” Synegubov said, adding that a nearby nine-storey building was also damaged.

He said a 74-year-old woman died and four others were injured.