DE News Desk :
Russia unleashed a massive drone assault across Ukraine overnight into Sunday, striking multiple regions, Ukrainian officials said, amid renewed skepticism from former US President Donald Trump over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s willingness to end the war.
At least one person was killed and a 14-year-old girl injured in Pavlohrad city of the Dnipropetrovsk region, which faced attacks for the third consecutive night, according to regional governor Serhii Lysak.
The strikes came shortly after Russia claimed it had retaken control of remaining areas in the Kursk region, parts of which Ukrainian forces had seized during a surprise offensive last August.
Ukrainian officials, however, maintained that fighting in Kursk was ongoing.
Speaking on Saturday, Trump expressed doubt that Putin was genuinely interested in ending the more than three-year-long conflict.
Just a day earlier, he had suggested that Ukraine and Russia were “very close to a deal.”
“There’s no reason for Putin to continue firing missiles into civilian areas, cities, and towns over the past few days,” Trump wrote in a social media post while returning to the US after attending Pope Francis’ funeral in the Vatican, where he also met briefly with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Trump hinted at the possibility of new sanctions on Russia.The Trump-Zelenskyy meeting marked their first face-to-face interaction since a tense confrontation during a White House meeting in late February.
Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched 149 drones and decoys during the overnight attack, of which 57 were shot down and another 67 neutralized through jamming measures.
Local officials reported additional injuries, with drone strikes wounding one person in Ukraine’s Odesa region and another in the city of Zhitomir.
Meanwhile, Russia’s Defence Ministry claimed its air defenses shot down five Ukrainian drones over the Bryansk border region and three more over Crimea, the peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.
In the partially occupied Donetsk region, five people were wounded after Ukrainian shelling targeted the city of Horlivka, according to the city’s Russian-installed mayor Ivan Prikhodko.