Russia launched a large-scale missile and drone attack on Ukraine, killing six people, including two children, on Wednesday, as the White House said the previous day that there were no plans for the meeting between President Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
A woman with her six-month-old baby, and 12-year-old daughter were killed along with three others in the massive overnight attack that also injured 27 people. The attack included 400 drones and 28 missiles and lasted most of the night of Tuesday and into Wednesday morning. A kindergarten in Kholodnoyarkiy district of northeastern Kharkiv region was hit by a drone drones, Kharkiv’s mayor, Ihor Terekhov, said in a statement. Capital Kyiv was struck with four ballistic missiles Ten people were rescued from a 16-storey residential building that caught fire after being hit by a drone wreckage in Kyiv, mayor, Vitali Klitschko said. Another 17-storey residential building was on fire due to being hit by drone debris.
Ukraine’s energy facilities were also hit by drones. “Due to a massive missile and drone attack on the energy infrastructure, emergency power outages have been introduced in most regions of Ukraine,” Ukraine’s energy ministry said in a statement.
Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy denounced the attack in a post on X: “There is no justification for a drone strike on a kindergarten, nor can there ever be. Clearly, Russia is growing more brazen. These strikes are Russia’s spit in the face to everyone who insists on a peaceful resolution. Thugs and terrorists can only be put in their place by force,” he wrote.
The large-scale attack came a day after the White House announced that the Budapest meeting between Trump and Putin scheduled for the upcoming weeks had been shelved, and that there were “no plans” for the summit “in the immediate future”.
Wednesday’s airstrikes also highlighted the failure of Trump’s recent initiatives to persuade Putin to agree to a truce and pushed Zelenskiy into making territorial concession in exchange for peace.
