Russia’s strikes on U.S. factory show it has no interest in peace, Ukraine says

KYIV - Russian missiles and drones slammed into Ukraine overnight Thursday with targets including a U.S.-owned business that President Volodymyr Zelensky said showed how Russia was not interested in peace.

The attack, which involved almost 600 drones and 40 missiles, comes days after two summits chaired by President Donald Trump were meant to resolve the war, which is in its fourth year. The bombardment hit targets in the rarely touched far west of the country and was the largest attack since early July, when Russia sent more than 700 drones and missiles into Ukraine.

In a post on Truth Social on Thursday, Trump expressed sympathy for Ukraine, which has been subjected to relentless Russian attacks and does not have comparable weapons to attack its invader. “It’s like a great team in sports that has a fantastic defense, but is not allowed to play offense. There is no chance of winning! It is like that with Ukraine and Russia. Crooked and grossly incompetent Joe Biden would not let Ukraine FIGHT BACK, only DEFEND.”

The Biden administration limited the kinds of weapons sent to Ukraine to avoid antagonizing Russia, but the Trump administration has periodically cut off weapons supplies and now insists they be paid for.

Ukraine and its Western allies, including the United States, are hammering out the “architecture” of security guarantees for Ukraine that would be ready in the next seven to 10 days, Zelensky said in remarks released Thursday. After the talks, he hopes to meet with his Russian counterpart to discuss a final peace deal. The security talks are underway in Brussels.

If Russian President Vladimir Putin refuses to meet with Zelensky, a key part of Trump’s push for peace, Ukraine “would like to see a strong reaction from the United States,” Zelensky added, suggesting measures to hurt Russia’s economy, including secondary sanctions and tariffs on those trading with the country.

While the White House has maintained that Russia has agreed to the bilateral meeting between the two leaders and it could take place in a week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has repeatedly quashed expectations of anything imminent.

“Putin is ready to meet with Zelensky only if all issues requiring discussion at the highest level are thoroughly worked out,” he said Thursday, a process that could a very long time.

The overnight drone attack was noteworthy for going after targets in the far west of the country, including against an American-Singapore electronics company Flex, which has a production facility in the city of Mukachevo, in the mountainous Transcarpathia region. That attack caused a large fire, injuring at least 19.

“It was an ordinary civilian enterprise, an American investment,” Zelensky wrote. “They produced such familiar household items as coffee machines. And this is also a target for the Russians. Very telling.”

Russian forces “delivered this strike as if nothing had changed at all,” he said. “There is still no signal from Moscow that they are really going to go into meaningful negotiations to end this war.”

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha wrote on X that the Flex factory was a “fully civilian facility that has nothing to do with defense or the military,” adding that Russian airstrikes had damaged other American businesses in the past, including the offices of Boeing earlier this year.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said the overnight strikes targeted on military and energy infrastructure.

Zelensky and European leaders have called for a ceasefire in the fighting to assist negotiations - a demand that Trump had supported until an about-face after a meeting last week in Alaska with Putin.

One of the major results of Monday’s meeting in Washington between Zelensky, Trump and European leaders was a pledge to come up with a framework for security guarantees to back any eventual peace deal to resolve the conflict, now in its fourth year.

Zelensky said the guarantees, which would assure that Russia would not launch another assault on Ukraine in the years to come, would be similar to NATO’s Article 5, which assures mutual defense by all its members if one member is attacked.

In his remarks Thursday, however, Lavrov accused Ukraine and European leaders of seeking to roll back the progress of the Putin-Trump meeting in Alaska and maintained that talk of security guarantees had involved Russian participation. “Everything else is a futile endeavor,” he said.

“Providing Ukraine with security guarantees through foreign military intervention is completely unacceptable,” he added. “Ukraine is clearly demonstrating that it is not interested in a sustainable and long-term resolution of the conflict.”

The overnight assault brought wave after wave of missiles and drones launched from various locations in Russia and lasted for hours until the all clear sounded after 6 a.m. At least one person was killed in the western city of Lviv, city officials wrote on social media.

The missiles and drones hit 11 locations and falling debris damaged another three sites, Ukraine’s air force said on Telegram.

In Lviv, “strikes were recorded in several districts of the city at multiple locations,” the emergency services wrote. “Private houses, nonresidential buildings and vehicles were damaged. Fires broke out.”

Ukrainian drones, meanwhile, struck Russia’s Novoshakhtinsk oil refinery in the nearby Rostov region in a continuing campaign against the country’s refinery capacity that has sent gasoline prices soaring.

The Moscow Times has calculated that repeated strikes in August have already disabled 13 percent of the country’s refining capacity, shutting down at least four refineries. Local media has reported gas lines in some cities and record prices at the pump.

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Abbakumova reported from Riga, Latvia.