Russia launched a sweeping drone assault and air attacks across Ukraine, killing at least four people, officials say, a day after United States President Donald Trump cast doubt over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s willingness to end the war.
According to a Facebook post by the Donetsk regional prosecutor’s office, Russia dropped three glide bombs on the city, about 10km (6 miles) from the front line, on Sunday. Russian forces have inched closer towards it over the past year.
A couple, aged 47 and 48, were killed, along with a 78-year-old pensioner, the post said, and 21 homes were damaged. Pictures from the scene showed a destroyed single-storey house and the shell of a burned-out car.
Another person died and a 14-year-old girl was wounded in a drone attack on the city of Pavlohrad in the Dnipropetrovsk region, which was hit for the third consecutive night, Governor Serhii Lysak said.
Russia also fired 149 exploding drones and decoys in the latest wave of attacks, the Ukrainian air force said, adding that 57 were intercepted and another 67 jammed.
One person was wounded in drone attacks on the Odesa region, and another in the city of Zhytomyr. Four people were wounded in an air attack on Kherson city on Sunday morning, according to local officials.
The attacks came hours after Putin claimed Russian forces had regained control over the remaining parts of the Kursk region, which Ukrainian forces seized in a surprise incursion last August. Ukrainian officials insisted the fighting in Kursk was continuing.
US questions peace efforts
Trump said on Saturday that he doubts Putin wants to end the more than three-year war in Ukraine, expressing scepticism that a peace deal can be reached soon. Only a day earlier, Trump had said Ukraine and Russia were “very close to a deal”.
During the presidential campaign, Trump often boasted he could end the war in 24 hours, but reality has proved more difficult.
“There was no reason for Putin to be shooting missiles into civilian areas, cities and towns, over the last few days”, Trump wrote in a social media post as he flew back to the US after attending Pope Francis’s funeral at the Vatican, where he met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy briefly on Saturday. Trump also hinted at further sanctions against Russia.
The Trump-Zelenskyy conversation on the sidelines of the pope’s funeral was the first face-to-face encounter between the two leaders since they argued during a heated Oval Office meeting at the White House in late February.
The two leaders, leaning in close to each other with no aides around them while seated in Saint Peter’s Basilica, spoke for about 15 minutes, according to Zelenskyy’s office, and images of the meeting released by Kyiv and Washington.
Zelenskyy said the meeting could prove historic if it delivers the kind of peace he is hoping for, and a White House spokesperson called it “very productive”.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Sunday that a peace deal needs to happen soon and that Washington is trying to determine whether it is worth continuing to serve as mediator.
“We cannot continue to dedicate time and resources to this effort if it’s not going to come to fruition,” Rubio told NBC’s Meet the Press programme.
“The last week has really been about figuring out how close are these sides really, and are they close enough that this merits a continued investment of our time as a mediator,” he added.
Suspect in car bomb attack
Separately on Sunday, Russian investigators filed terrorism charges against a man suspected of killing a senior Russian military officer near Moscow, the Interfax news agency reported.
The Kremlin has blamed Kyiv for Friday’s car bomb blast that killed 59-year-old Yaroslav Moskalik, the latest in a series of Russian military officers and pro-war figures to be assassinated since the start of the war in Ukraine.
Ukraine has not commented on the incident.
Interfax, citing Russia’s Investigative Committee, said the suspect, Ignat Kuzin, who used to live in Ukraine, had pleaded guilty to killing Moskalik and had said he was recruited and paid by Ukraine’s security services.
Moskalik, who was deputy head of the main operations directorate of Russia’s General Staff, was killed on Friday in the town of Balashikha, hours before Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff was due to hold talks with Putin in Moscow.
The Investigative Committee said Russian authorities were trying to identify others who might have been involved in Moskalik’s killing.
