Hours after US President Donald Trump said that he was convinced Russian strongman Vladimir Putin “wants to make a deal” on peace with Ukraine, Moscow’s forces hammered civilian targets across the country.
Russian warplanes attacked the Donetsk region city of Sloviansk with aerial bombs on Wednesday evening, hitting a multi-story building. At least eight people were injured, including two children, according to the head of the Donetsk Regional Military Administration Vadym Filashkin.
“At least eight people have been injured, including two children, as a result of multiple strikes on Sloviansk. Today, the Russians dropped nine aerial bombs on the town, one of which hit a multi-story building,” Filashkin wrote.
The victims included a three-year-old child, a 72-year-old man and a 78-year-old woman.
In President Volodymyr Zelensky’s home city of Kryvyi Rih, Russian missile strikes on Wednesday sent five civilians to the hospital, according to Vladyslav Hayvanenko, acting head of the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Military Administration.
The Kremlin’s relentless air strikes also killed at least one civilian in Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, according to its mayor Ihor Terekhov. Military administration officials reported that, while working at the scene of one of several collapsed structures on Wednesday evening, first responders recovered a body from under the rubble and were working to locate other potentially buried victims.
In all, the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces reported that evening, invading forces launched 52 airstrikes, using one missile and 153 guided aerial bombs. In addition, the Russians carried out 3,787 shelling attacks, including 50 with multiple launch rocket systems, and deployed 4,406 kamikaze drones across Ukrainian territory.
Meanwhile, in Washington, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday that his envoy for peace missions Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner, both real-estate developers who have never held elected office nor any prior diplomatic credentials, had “a reasonably good” meeting with Putin.
The president later said the discussions were, in fact, “very good” and said his delegates came away with the impression Putin would “like to see the war ended... Their impression was very strongly that he wants to make a deal,” Trump said.
On Tuesday night, Russian drone and missile attacks overnight killed two people, injured several others, and caused major power outages across four Ukrainian regions as strikes on energy infrastructure intensified.
According to the Ministry of Energy, more than 17,500 consumers in the Kharkiv region and around 5,000 in Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia, as well as residents in the Kherson region, were left without electricity.