Moscow sent 273 drones to Ukraine in a record-breaking attack early Sunday, two days after Russian President Vladimir Putin snubbed ceasefire talks with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Turkey.
The attack was the single largest since the Kremlin started its full-scale invasion in 2022, the Ukrainian air force said. A woman died in the Kyiv region, while the assault also targeted the eastern Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk regions, officials said.
The number of casualties might rise, the Kyiv Independent reported.
Russia seemingly used a lot of decoy drones, the Ukrainian air force said, because almost half of the attacking vehicles simply disappeared from the radar systems. Some 88 of them were intercepted, it said.
U.S. President Donald Trump late Saturday said he will call both Putin and Zelenskyy on Monday as he looks to broker an end to the conflict. Although Zelenskyy attended a meeting in Turkey last week to discuss a ceasefire, Putin didn’t even send a minister.
Europe, meanwhile, is far from discussing peacekeeping troops for Ukraine, new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said as he was visiting Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in Rome. A ceasefire is the necessary first step, he said.
“There is no reason to talk about [troops] at the moment; we are far from that. We want the weapons to stop, the killing to end,” Merz said on Saturday.
At a meeting in the Albanian capital of Tirana on Friday, European leaders discussed further sanctions threats to pressure Russia.
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