Russia unleashed a barrage of nearly 600 drones and missiles at Ukraine overnight into Saturday, according to Ukrainian officials. It was the second large-scale aerial attack in three days, after a lull earlier this month as President Trump tried to arrange peace talks.
The assault hit cities across the country, from Lutsk in the west to Zaporizhzhia in the southeast, where a strike on a residential building killed one person and injured 24 more, according to Ukrainian officials. Images released on social media by Ukraine’s emergency services in Zaporizhzhia showed firefighters battling flames engulfing brick buildings, some of them mostly reduced to rubble.
The attack occurred just two days after a similarly large wave of strikes on Kyiv, the capital, killed 25 people, according to Ukrainian officials, and damaged buildings used by the European Union and the British government.
Ukrainian leaders cast the latest strikes as further proof that Russia was not interested in peace. President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed on social media that Moscow had “used the time” meant for preparing a proposed bilateral meeting between him and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia “to organize new massive attacks.”
Mr. Trump said earlier this month that Mr. Putin had agreed to meet with Mr. Zelensky for the first time since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022, framing it as a major step toward peace. Top Ukrainian officials this week visited countries that could potentially host the meeting, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Switzerland.
But Moscow has poured cold water on the idea, repeatedly insisting that conditions for such a meeting must be met, without specifying what those conditions are. No meeting is planned, Russian officials have said, and air assaults on Ukrainian cities have returned to the intensity seen before Mr. Putin met with Mr. Trump in Alaska on Aug. 15.
Meanwhile, Ukraine and Russia have launched multiple strikes on each other’s energy facilities in recent weeks.
On Saturday, the Ukrainian army claimed to have struck two oil refineries in western Russia. Kyiv has targeted Russian refineries several times a week in an effort to wound Moscow’s oil industry, a key source of revenues for its war effort, and worsen shortages that have driven up fuel prices in Russia.
Though there is no end in sight to the war, Kyiv’s Western allies have been working to map out the security guarantees they could offer Ukraine in a postwar settlement. Officials from NATO members and Ukraine have met nearly every day over the past two weeks to explore options, including stationing European troops in Ukraine and providing American air support.
No concrete results from the meetings have been made public, but Mr. Zelensky said that he expected the framework for an agreement to be formalized in the coming days.
Mr. Zelensky told reporters on Friday that security guarantees should rest on “three pillars.” The first is a beefed-up Ukrainian military that would serve as a deterrent to Russia. The second is Western protection modeled on NATO’s Article 5 mutual defense clause, which could include the deployment of Western troops in Ukraine. The third pillar focuses on economic sanctions on Russia to prevent it from expanding its military power and resume the war.
But Ukraine’s conditions and Russia’s are mutually incompatible. The Kremlin has insisted on a largely demilitarized, nonaligned Ukraine, which Kyiv says would make it nothing more than a defenseless Russian satellite.
Constant Méheut reports on the war in Ukraine, including battlefield developments, attacks on civilian centers and how the war is affecting its people.
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