Russia unleashed a barrage of nearly 600 drones and missiles at Ukraine overnight into Saturday, according to Ukrainian officials. It was the second large-scale aerial attack in three days, after a lull this month as US president Donald Trump tried to arrange peace talks.
The assault hit cities across the country, from Lutsk in the west to Zaporizhzhia in the southeast, where a strike on a residential building killed one person and injured 24 more, according to Ukrainian officials. Images released on social media by Ukraine’s emergency services in Zaporizhzhia showed firefighters battling flames engulfing brick buildings, some of them mostly reduced to rubble.
The attack occurred just two days after a similarly large wave of strikes on Kyiv, the capital, killed 25 people, according to Ukrainian officials, and damaged buildings used by the European Union and the British government.
In another grim development, a Ukrainian lawmaker who was a former speaker of parliament, Andriy Parubiy, was shot dead on Saturday in the western city of Lviv, in what President Volodymyr Zelenskiy described as a “horrendous murder”.
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Police said they were searching for the killer, whose motives were unknown, leaving it unclear whether there was a connection to the war with Russia. The office of the Ukrainian prosecutor general said that a gunman had fired several shots at Mr Parubiy on a sidewalk before fleeing. Mr Zelenskiy said the killing had been “carefully prepared”.
Mr Parubiy played a prominent role in the 2014 Maidan protests that led to the ouster of Ukraine’s last pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych. Mr Parubiy led the protesters’ security forces, which battled with Ukraine’s riot police.
It was the second deadly attack on a former lawmaker in Lviv, following the killing of far-right politician Iryna Farion last year. Mr Parubiy also started his career on the far right, founding a party in the 1990s that Farion would later join, before moving to the centre-right and joining the main opposition party, European Solidarity, headed by Zelenskyy’s predecessor, Petro Poroshenko.
Ukrainian leaders cast Saturday’s missile and drone strikes as further proof that Russia was not interested in peace. Mr Zelenskiy claimed on social media that Moscow had “used the time” meant for preparing a proposed bilateral meeting between him and President Vladimir Putin of Russia “to organise new massive attacks”.
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Mr Trump said this month that Mr Putin had agreed to meet Mr Zelenskiy for the first time since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, framing it as a major step toward peace. Top Ukrainian officials this past week visited countries that could potentially host the meeting, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Switzerland.
But Moscow has poured cold water on the idea, repeatedly insisting that conditions for such a meeting must be met, without specifying what those conditions are. No meeting is planned, Russian officials have said, and air assaults on Ukrainian cities have returned to the intensity seen before Mr Putin met Mr Trump in Alaska on August 15th.
Meanwhile, Ukraine and Russia have launched multiple strikes on each other’s energy facilities in recent weeks.
On Saturday, the Ukrainian army claimed to have struck two oil refineries in western Russia. Kyiv has targeted Russian refineries several times a week in an effort to wound Moscow’s oil industry, a key source of revenues for its war effort, and worsen shortages that have driven up fuel prices in Russia.
Though there is no end in sight to the war, Kyiv’s Western allies have been working to map out the security guarantees they could offer Ukraine in a postwar settlement. Officials from Nato members and Ukraine have met nearly every day over the past two weeks to explore options, including stationing European troops in Ukraine and providing American air support.
No concrete results from the meetings have been made public, but Mr Zelenskiy said that he expected the framework for an agreement to be formalized in the coming days.
Mr Zelenskiy told reporters Friday that security guarantees should rest on “three pillars”. The first is a beefed-up Ukrainian military that would serve as a deterrent to Russia. The second is western protection modeled on Nato’s article five mutual defence clause, which could include the deployment of western troops in Ukraine. The third pillar focuses on economic sanctions on Russia to prevent it from expanding its military power and resume the war.
But Ukraine’s conditions and Russia’s are mutually incompatible. The Kremlin has insisted on a largely demilitarised, nonaligned Ukraine, which Kyiv says would make it nothing more than a defenceless Russian satellite. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
