A RUSSIAN attack on Ukraine has killed six people and wounded dozens of others, officials said, while emergency crews restored power to more than 400,000 households in Kyiv after strikes on the grid, as the US attempts to broker peace talks.
“While everyone is discussing points of peace plans, Russia continues to pursue its ‘war plan’ of two points: to kill and destroy,” Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha wrote on X on Saturday.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia had launched about 36 missiles and nearly 600 drones in the attack.
The Kyiv City Military Administration said two people were killed in the strikes on the capital, Kyiv.
Regional officials and police said one person had died in the region surrounding the capital, two in the southeastern Dnipropetrovsk region, and one in a midday attack in the Kherson region in the south.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said 29 people were wounded in the city, noting that falling debris from intercepted Russian drones hit residential buildings. He also said that the western part of Kyiv had lost power.
“The world should know that Russia is targeting entire families,” Kyiv’s military administration head, Tymur Tkachenko, said.
Following the attack, the European Union’s ambassador to Ukraine, Katarina Mathernova, cast doubt on Russia’s stated interest in a peace deal.
“While the world discusses a possible peace deal. Moscow answers with missiles, not diplomacy,” Mathernova said in a post on X.
On the diplomatic front, Zelenskyy said that his negotiators had left for the United States to seek a “dignified peace” and a rapid end to the war, started by Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
Zelenskyy is under growing pressure from Washington to agree to a US proposal to end the war, which critics say heavily favours Moscow.
At Kyiv’s insistence, US President Donald Trump’s initial 28-point plan to end the war was revised during talks in Geneva with European and US officials. However, many contentious issues remain unresolved.
The Ukrainian team is being led by former defence chief Rustem Umerov, following the resignation on Friday of Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, amid a corruption probe.
“The task is clear: to swiftly and substantively work out the steps needed to end the war,” Zelenskyy posted on X.
“Ukraine continues to work with the United States in the most constructive way possible, and we expect that the results of the meetings in Geneva will now be hammered out in the United States,” the Ukrainian president added.
According to media reports citing US officials, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, will meet the Ukrainian delegation on Sunday in Florida.
Separately on Saturday, an official from Ukraine’s SBU security service said that Ukraine had hit two tankers, used by Russia to export oil while skirting Western sanctions, with marine drones in the Black Sea.
The joint operation to hit the so-called “shadow fleet” vessels was run by the SBU and Ukraine’s navy, the official told the Reuters news agency on condition of anonymity.
Turkish authorities have said that blasts rocked two shadow fleet tankers near Turkiye’s Bosphorus Strait on Friday, causing fires on the vessels, and rescue operations were launched for those on board.