Ukraine intends to strike deep into Russia following a large Russian drone attack that left 60,000 Ukrainians without electricity, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said.
Speaking on Sunday after a meeting with his top general, Oleksandr Syrskii, the Ukrainian president confirmed the new planned strikes on X.
Both sides have intensified their air strikes in recent weeks, with Moscow attacking Ukraine’s energy and transport systems as well as launching deadly strikes in recent days on civilian areas in Kyiv and Zaporizhia, and Ukraine targeting Russian oil refineries and pipelines.
Overnight, Russian drones hit four energy facilities in Ukraine’s Odesa region, according to the private energy company DTEK. The strikes left 29,000 people without electricity, local authorities reported.
The port city of Chornomorsk near Odesa, where one person was injured, was the worst-affected place, regional Governor Oleh Kiper wrote on Telegram. “Critical infrastructure is operating on generators,” he said.
DTEK said emergency repair work would start following the all-clear from the Ukrainian military, which reported that in total, Russia had attacked Ukraine with 142 drones, all but 10 of which it claimed to have downed.
The Russian military suggested on Sunday that it had shot down 112 Ukrainian drones in the past 24 hours.
Meanwhile, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov blamed Europe for the continuation of the war and for hampering United States President Donald Trump’s peace efforts.
“The European warring party is maintaining its fundamental course; it is not giving in,” he said from the sidelines of a summit in China, in a reference to the European Union’s arms deliveries to Ukraine.
His words came just days after a Russian air strike killed at least 23 people and damaged EU diplomatic offices in central Kyiv.
Speaking just hours before Trump’s deadline for Russian President Vladimir Putin to agree to a meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart Zelenskyy, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said he thought the war, which began more than three and a half years ago, would not finish soon.
“I am preparing myself inwardly for this war to last a long time,” he told the public broadcaster ZDF on Sunday, noting that diplomatic efforts to bring the conflict to an end could not come “at the price of Ukraine’s capitulation”.
Elsewhere, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, travelled to Poland on Sunday as part of her tour of EU states that border Russia and its ally Belarus.
Speaking alongside the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, von der Leyen called Putin a “predator” who could only be kept in check through “strong deterrence”.
The EU Commission president also said that member states bordering Russia and Belarus would receive additional funding from the bloc, calling the defence of its borders a “shared responsibility”.
While the EU continues to highlight Russia’s security risk for the wider continent, the Kremlin has sought to embellish its military achievements in a bid to make its victory in Ukraine seem inevitable, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a US think tank.
In its latest assessment of the conflict, ISW said that Russian army chief General Valery Gerasimov’s claims on Saturday about Russian gains were exaggerated.
The Russian general had suggested that the Kremlin’s forces had captured 3,500sq km [1,351sq miles] of territory and 149 settlements since the start of March.
“Gerasimov’s claims notably inflate Russian gains by roughly 1,200 square kilometres [463sq miles] and 19 settlements,” the ISW said.
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