At least 16 people have been killed and dozens more wounded in a Russian drone and missile attack on the western city of Ternopil that hit two blocks of flats, Ukrainian officials say.

Among the 64 wounded were 14 children, police said, in one of the deadliest Russian strikes on western Ukraine since the full-scale war began in February 2022.

Two other western regions were hit, Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk, and a drone attack targeted three districts of the northern city of Kharkiv, wounding more than 30 people. Photos posted online showed buildings and cars ablaze.

Power cuts were affecting a number of regions across the country, Ukraine’s energy ministry said.

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia had fired more than 470 drones and 47 missiles, leaving “significant destruction”. He warned that people could be trapped under the rubble in Ternopil.

The devastation caused by the Russian strikes soon became clear. A video shared by Zelensky showed that one of the two blocks of flats had completely caved in. The interior minister Ihor Klymenko said it had been destroyed between the third and the ninth floor.

Plumes of smoke poured from windows and small fires burned outside the tenement.

A giant smoke cloud rose in the distance behind the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Ternopil, as sirens blared throughout the city.

Energy facilities, transport and civil infrastructure were damaged elsewhere in western Ukraine.

The energy sector came under attack in Ivano-Frankivsk region where two of three people reported wounded were children.

The head of Lviv region said an energy facility had been struck.

The Russian strikes came a day after Ukraine’s military said it had fired US-supplied longer-range Atacms missiles at military targets inside Russia, the first time they have admitted using the Atacms on Russian soil.

Russia’s defence ministry accused Ukraine of firing four of the missiles at the southern city of Voronezh but said they had all been shot down by air defences.

Meanwhile, Zelensky is heading to the Turkish capital Ankara, in an attempt to revive a US bid to end the war. He will hold talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan amid reports that President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff has been working on a plan with Russian counterpart Kirill Dmitriev.

The Kremlin said no Russian representative would be joining the talks in Ankara. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on a media report that the US and Russia had been secretly working on a peace plan for Ukraine.

“In this case, there is nothing new that we can inform you about,” Peskov told journalists on Wednesday.

His comments came amid reports that Zelensky was due to meet two top US army officials in Kyiv on Thursday. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and Army Chief of Staff General Randy George are the most senior US military officials to visit the Ukrainian capital since President Donald Trump took office, Reuters reports.

In a separate development, Romania’s defence ministry said a Russian drone had flown for about 8km (5 miles) through its airspace in the early hours of Wednesday. The drone then crossed into Ukraine and Moldova before returning to Romania, it said.

Romanian and German air force planes were scrambled in response to the incursion and the defence ministry said it was unclear where the drone had come down.

Poland also deployed jets early on Wednesday and temporarily closed two airports in the southeast in response to the strikes in western Ukraine.

As the fourth anniversary of the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion approaches next February, Moscow and Kyiv remain fundamentally opposed in their views of how to end the war.

Earlier this month Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Russia’s conditions for a peace deal had not changed since Putin laid them out in 2024.

Insurance premiums are rising fast in the parts of the United States most exposed to climate-related disasters like wildfires and hurricanes.

New research shows that, as insurance has sharply pushed up the cost of owning a home, the price shock is starting to reverberate through the broader real estate market.

Rising insurance costs are eating into household budgets.

In some areas of the country that are exposed to disasters, homes are not selling because prospective buyers can’t afford both the mortgage and the insurance.

In parts of the hail-prone Midwestern states, insurance now eats up more than one-fifth of the average homeowner’s total housing payments, including mortgage costs and property taxes. In Orleans Parish, La., that number is nearly 30 percent.

Home insurance costs have soared where climate hazards are highest.

Nationally, insurance rates have risen by an average of 58 percent since 2018, outpacing inflation by a substantial margin. But that growth has been highly uneven across the United States.

Places that are most vulnerable to climate-related disasters like hurricanes, fires and hail are seeing some of the largest premium increases. It’s not always the case that the highest climate risk translates into the highest insurance costs. Local policies and regulations have helped keep prices lower in high-risk places, like parts of California. Other factors, like a homeowner’s credit score, can affect premiums, too.

What’s driving up insurance prices?

Since 2017, an obscure part of the insurance market, known as reinsurance, has helped push up premiums. Insurance companies buy reinsurance to help limit their exposure when a catastrophe hits. Over the past several years, reinsurance companies have experienced what Benjamin Keys and Philip Mulder, the researchers who led the new study, call a “climate epiphany.” As a result, the rates they charge to protect home insurance companies against catastrophic losses have roughly doubled.

Insurance providers have, in turn, passed these costs on to homeowners. The rapid repricing of climate risk is responsible for about 20 percent of home insurance premium increases since 2017, according to Dr. Keys and Dr. Mulder.

What else is contributing to high rates? Rebuilding costs are responsible for about 35 percent of the recent changes, the research found. Population shifts and inflation are factors, too.

High insurance prices are weighing down home values.

Since 2018, a financial shock in the home insurance market has meant that homes in the ZIP codes most exposed to hurricanes and wildfires sell for an average of $43,900 less than they otherwise would have, the research found.

In many places, insurance has been a relatively small part of the homebuying equation. Now, for many, it’s a major consideration.

For several homeowners we interviewed in Louisiana, monthly insurance costs are now higher than their home loan payments.

The research shows buyers may be factoring rising insurance costs into the prices they’re willing to pay for homes. As a result, homes in some areas are selling for less.

An alarming watershed for artificial intelligence, or an overhyped threat?

AI startup Anthropic’s recent announcement that it detected the world’s first artificial intelligence-led hacking campaign has prompted a multitude of responses from cybersecurity experts.

While some observers have raised the alarm about the long-feared arrival of a dangerous inflection point, others have greeted the claims with scepticism, arguing that the startup’s account leaves out crucial details and raises more questions than answers.

In a report on Friday, Anthropic said its assistant Claude Code was manipulated to carry out 80-90 percent of a “large-scale” and “highly sophisticated” cyberattack, with human intervention required “only sporadically”.

Anthropic, the creator of the popular Claude chatbot, said the attack aimed to infiltrate government agencies, financial institutions, tech firms and chemical manufacturing companies, though the operation was only successful in a small number of cases.

The San Francisco-based company, which attributed the attack to Chinese state-sponsored hackers, did not specify how it had uncovered the operation, nor identify the “roughly” 30 entities that it said had been targeted.

Roman V Yampolskiy, an AI and cybersecurity expert at the University of Louisville, said there was no doubt that AI-assisted hacking posed a serious threat, though it was difficult to verify the precise details of Anthropic’s account.

“Modern models can write and adapt exploit code, sift through huge volumes of stolen data, and orchestrate tools faster and more cheaply than human teams,” Yampolskiy told Al Jazeera.

“They lower the skills barrier for entry and increase the scale at which well-resourced actors can operate. We are effectively putting a junior cyber-operations team in the cloud, rentable by the hour.”

Yampolskiy said he expected AI to increase both the frequency and the severity of attacks.

Jaime Sevilla, director of Epoch AI, said he did not see much new in Anthropic’s report, but past experience dictated that AI-assisted attacks were both feasible and likely to become increasingly common.

“This is likely to hit medium-sized businesses and government agencies hardest,” Sevilla told Al Jazeera.

“Historically, they weren’t valuable enough targets for dedicated campaigns and often underinvested in cybersecurity, but AI makes them profitable targets. I expect many of these organisations to adapt by hiring cybersecurity specialists, launching vulnerability-reward programmes, and using AI to detect and patch weaknesses internally.”

While many analysts have expressed their desire for more information from Anthropic, some have been dismissive of its claims.

After United States Senator Chris Murphy warned that AI-led attacks would “destroy us” if regulation did not become a priority, Meta AI chief scientist Yann LeCun called out the lawmaker for being “played” by a company seeking regulatory capture.

“They are scaring everyone with dubious studies so that open source models are regulated out of existence,” LeCun said in a post on X.

Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington, DC, said China “consistently and resolutely” opposed all forms of cyberattacks.

“We hope that relevant parties will adopt a professional and responsible attitude, basing their characterisation of cyber incidents on sufficient evidence, rather than unfounded speculation and accusations,” Liu Pengyu told Al Jazeera.

Toby Murray, computer security expert at the University of Melbourne, said that Anthropic had business incentives to highlight both the dangers of such attacks and its ability to counter them.

“Some people have questioned Anthropic’s claims that suggest that the attackers were able to get Claude AI to perform highly complex tasks with less human oversight than is typically required,” Murray told Al Jazeera.

“Unfortunately, they don’t give us hard evidence to say exactly what tasks were performed or what oversight was provided. So it’s difficult to pass judgement one way or the other on these claims.”

Still, Murray said he did not find the report particularly surprising, considering how effective some AI assistants are at tasks such as coding.

“I don’t see AI-powered hacking changing the kinds of hacks that will occur,” he said.

“However, it might usher in a change of scale. We should expect to see more AI-powered hacks in the future, and for those hacks to become more successful.”

While AI is set to pose growing risks to cybersecurity, it will also be pivotal in bolstering defences, analysts say.

Fred Heiding, a Harvard University research fellow who specialises in computer security and AI security, said he believes AI will provide a “significant advantage” to cybersecurity specialists in the long term.

“Today, many cyber-operations are held back by a shortage of human cyber-professionals. AI will help us overcome this bottleneck by enabling us to test all our systems at scale,” Heiding told Al Jazeera.

Heiding, who described Anthropic’s account as broadly credible but “overstated”, said the big danger is that hackers will have a window of opportunity to run amok as security experts struggle to catch up with their exploitation of increasingly advanced AI.

“Unfortunately, the defensive community is likely to be too slow to implement the new technology into automated security testing and patching solutions,” he said.

“If that is the case, attackers will wreak havoc on our systems with the press of a button, before our defences have had time to catch up.”