A Russian drone barrage targeted the center of Kharkiv on Friday, injuring nine people and damaging a maternity hospital in Ukraine's second-largest city, officials said.

Mothers with newborns were being evacuated to a different medical facility, Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov wrote on Telegram. He didn't say whether anyone at the hospital was among the injured.

The Kremlin on Friday criticized Emmanuel Macron, a day after the French president said plans to send a peacekeeping force to Ukraine were "ready" should Moscow and Kyiv agree to an elusive ceasefire.

"The presence of foreign troops near our borders is unacceptable to us," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, accusing European leaders of a "pattern of militaristic anti-Russian sentiment."

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz urged U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday to "stay with us" Europeans in maintaining support for Ukraine, at a Rome conference on rebuilding the war-torn country.

Addressing himself "to Washington DC and to President Donald Trump: stay with us and stay with the Europeans, we are on the same page and we are looking for a stable political order in this world" -- adding in a message to Moscow, that "we will not give up".

The European Parliament on Thursday voted down a no-confidence motion against EU chief Ursula von der Leyen, initiated by the far right over her handling of Covid vaccine contracts.

Von der Leyen comfortably survived the vote by a wide margin, with 360 MEPs rejecting it and 175 backing the move.

The UK and France will declare that the two nations' nuclear deterrents, while independent, can be coordinated and that they will jointly respond to any "extreme threat to Europe," both countries said Wednesday.

The declaration, to be signed Thursday, will state that the respective deterrents of both countries remain independent "but can be co-ordinated, and that there is no extreme threat to Europe that would not prompt a response by both nations", the UK government and French presidency said.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Thursday he expressed "disappointment and frustration" to his Russian counterpart over the lack of progress on resolving the Ukraine war.

"I echoed what the president (Donald Trump) said, both a disappointment and frustration at the lack of progress," Rubio told reporters after the meeting with Sergei Lavrov on the sidelines of the ASEAN gathering in Malaysia.

The Security Service of Ukraine said Thursday that one of its members had been killed in central Kyiv, in the most recent apparent targeted attack of security personnel since Russia invaded Ukraine.

"A criminal investigation has been launched into the murder of an SBU employee in the Golosiivsky district of Kyiv," the SBU said in written comments to AFP.

U.S. President Donald Trump is hosting five West African leaders on Wednesday for a "multilateral lunch" at the White House as the region reels from the impact of U.S. aid cuts.

The leaders of Liberia, Senegal, Gabon, Mauritania and Guinea-Bissau are expected to discuss key areas of cooperation, including economic development, security, infrastructure and democracy, according to a statement from the Liberian presidency. The White House has not provided further details.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez presented anti-corruption measures in response to the mounting corruption cases involving his Socialist Party, and again said he would not step down from office.

Speaking in parliament Wednesday at an extraordinary session about a corruption probe involving a former Socialist Party official, the Spanish leader took responsibility for his poor judgement but repeatedly said he would not step down, calling himself "an honest politician" with "the pride of leading an exemplary party."

Russia fired a record 728 Shahed and decoy drones at Ukraine overnight, as well as 13 cruise and ballistic missiles, the Ukrainian air force said Wednesday, in the latest escalation after weeks of mounting Russian aerial and ground attacks in the more than three-year war.

The city of Lutsk, which lies in Ukraine's northwest along the border with Poland and Belarus, was the hardest hit, though 10 other regions were also struck, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.