WASHINGTON — Russian dictator Vladimir Putin ordered the largest drone strike on Ukraine in a month on Monday night — just as he hung up the phone with President Trump in a call discussing next steps for peace.
As Trump celebrated his significant progress toward ending Russia’s war on Ukraine in White House meetings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders on Monday, Moscow launched 270 drones and 10 missiles into the war-torn neighbor’s territory.
It came after at least 14 civilians were killed and more than 50 others were injured in a similar Russian strike ahead of the Monday meeting.
Among the dead was an entire family, including two children — ages one and 15 — their parents and grandmother, according to the Ukrainian government. They were at home in Kharkiv — roughly 15 miles from the Russian border — in the middle of the night when the fatal blast happened.
“An ordinary apartment block … families with small children, a children’s playground, a residential compound,” neighbor Olena Yakusheva told Reuters on Monday while fighting back tears.
That assault added to the war’s already horrifying death toll of nearly 13,000 civilians — including 569 children — since Russia invaded in February 2022, according to the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office data shared with The Post.
Put in perspective, that’s more than four times the civilian toll of the Sept. 11, 2011 attacks.
”Several children were killed,” Zelensky’s top advisor Andriy Yermak told The Post on Monday. “How is that possible if [Putin] sat and committed to Trump: ‘Yes, I am ready for peace.’”
”[Putin] is a liar — a professional liar,” he added.
Trump has previously expressed frustration over Putin launching aerial attacks hours after promising the US president of his desire for peace, but he had not spoken out about the latest attack as of Tuesday afternoon.
“I go home, I tell the first lady, ‘You know, I spoke to Vladimir today. We had a wonderful conversation.’ She said, ‘Oh, really? Another city was just hit,’” he said in July, recounting a call earlier this summer.
“We get a lot of bulls–t thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth,” he said another time.
Last month was the deadliest since Putin launched his full-scale war on Ukraine three and a half years ago. In July alone, 286 civilians were killed and another 1,388, according to official data.
It was the second month in a row that Russia had reached an all-time high in the number of civilians killed during the course of its full-scale war.
Also in July, Russia set a new record of 728 drones launched in a single night, blasting past its prior record of 337 set in March.
While roughly 60% of the civilian deaths have occurred in communities near the front lines, the remaining 40% have happened far from the war’s center, including in the capital city of Kyiv, according to a Monday United Nations report.
