Russia has carried out yet more devastating strikes on Ukrainian cities, just hours after US President Donald Trump suggested Vladimir Putin may not want peace. Kyiv said on Sunday (April 27) that Russia launched at least 149 drones at its cities overnight, with one person killed.
The Zhytomyr, Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, Donetsk, Sumy, and Cherkasy regions were targeted, according to Ukrainian officials. Ukraine‘s air force said it shot down nearly 60 drones, while almost 70 vanished from radars without reaching their targets, which usually is the result of jamming by electronic defence systems.
The Governor of Ukraine‘s Dnipropetrovsk region said a man was killed in the city of Pavlohrad and a girl aged 14 was wounded. The same city was targeted by Russia on Friday, with a drone strike damaging a residential building and causing multiple civilian casualties.
News of the strikes comes after US President Donald Trump said on Saturday (April 26) that he doubted Russia President Vladimir Putin wants to end the war in Ukraine.
Mr Trump expressed scepticism that a peace deal can be reached soon after only a day earlier saying Ukraine and Russia were “very close to a deal”.
In a social media post, Mr Trump said: “There was no reason for Putin to be shooting missiles into civilian areas, cities and towns, over the last few days.”
He added: “It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along, and has to be dealt with differently, through ‘Banking’ or ‘Secondary Sanctions’? Too many people are dying!”
His comments were in sharp contrast with Mr Trump’s positive assessment that the two sides were “very close to a deal” after his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, met with Putin in Moscow on Friday. They came after Mr Trump and Ukraine‘s President Volodymyr Zelensky met on the sidelines of Pope Francis’s funeral in Vatican City yesterday.
Their conversation 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.
That confrontation led the White House to briefly pause US military assistance and intelligence sharing with Ukraine.
Days after ordering the pause, Mr Trump also announced he was “strongly considering” imposing new sanctions and tariffs on Russia to try to prod Putin to negotiate.
Mr Trump has not yet followed through on the threat, which is something even some of his staunchest Republican allies are now urging him to do.
The meeting between Mr Trump and Mr Zelensky also came after the US leader issued his most definitive statement to date on the need for Ukraine to cede territory to Russia to bring the war to a close. He said in a Time magazine interview published Friday that “Crimea will stay with Russia“.
Russia seized the strategic peninsula on the Black Sea in southern Ukraine in 2014, years before the full-scale invasion began in February 2022.
Mr Zelensky wants to take back Crimea and other Ukrainian territory seized by Russia, but Mr Trump sees that demand as unrealistic.
Russia has also seized Ukrainian territory in the Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions since Moscow launched the full-scale invasion.
Referring to Crimea during the interview with Time magazine, Mr Trump said “everybody understands that it’s been with them (Russia) for a long time”.