By Yurii Kovalenko
KYIV, June 2 (Reuters) - When a large explosion shook Olha Mudra's apartment block in Kyiv in the early hours of Tuesday, it felt like the end of the world.
Mudra, her hair covered in dust and face smeared with soot, recalled the moment when the blast occurred, in the third mass attack on the Ukrainian capital in as many weeks.
"There was smoke everywhere, you couldn't see anything," Mudra told Reuters, standing with her 6-year-old daughter Natalia. "We couldn't understand what was
happening - some kind of apocalypse?"
Behind her, emergency workers and fellow residents surveyed damaged buildings, twisted debris and burned-out vehicles that have become a familiar sight in an aerial war with Russia that appears to be intensifying.
Both sides say they only attack military targets. But civilians are also caught up in the horror, with at least 18 people killed and more than 100 wounded in the latest Russian strikes.
At least 12 of the deaths came in the southeastern city of Dnipro.
Outside a ruined apartment building there, a small group of family and friends looked on in shock as rescue workers removed at least three bodies from the rubble. One man among them burst into tears.
In Kyiv, it was not clear if Mudra's home was hit by a drone or a missile, or by debris from a projectile downed by Ukrainian air defences. Whatever the cause, confusion followed.
"We were calling other people, as we couldn't see anything," she said. "People were using flashlights, as it was dark. We couldn't understand where we were."
PACKED METROS, GROWING EXHAUSTION
Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities awoke on Tuesday to the wail of air raid alerts and boom of air defences and incoming drones and missiles that lit up the night sky on impact.
Thousands of residents of the capital hurried to metro stations where they lay out mattresses and set up tents along packed platforms to shelter from the danger deep underground.
Anna Krzhypenska, a 21-year-old student, summed up the sense of exhaustion from a conflict well into its fifth year.
"It's difficult, both mentally and physically, because you would like to wake up peacefully in the morning, have a cup of coffee, but instead you have to go downstairs (to the metro)."
The bombardment comes amid an escalation in rhetoric between Russia and Ukraine that leaves little hope of a swift end to Europe's deadliest conflict since World War Two.
Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, hoping to topple the pro-Western government in Kyiv. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and thousands of civilians have been killed since, although the front lines are barely budging.
(Reporting by Reuters reporters in Kyiv; writing by Mike Collett-White; editing by Gareth Jones)
