After Trump-Putin summit suspended, Russia pounds Ukraine, killing seven
KYIV - Hours after a meeting planned for next week between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Hungary was scrapped - at least for the near future - Russia hammered Ukraine in an overnight attack that stretched into the next day, killing seven people, including two children, and leaving parts of the country without power Wednesday.
More than 400 drones and 28 missiles were launched, many slamming into cities across Ukraine, from Kyiv to Zaporizhzhia to Odesa. Attacks on the electrical grid led to emergency outages in most of Ukraine’s regions, leaving civilians without power as temperatures drop. The regions most left in the dark continue to be those closest to Russia, including Chernihiv in the north and Sumy in the east.
“Russia continues to do everything to weasel out of diplomacy,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a statement Tuesday night. “As soon as the issue of long-range capabilities for us - for Ukraine - became less immediate, Russia’s interest in diplomacy faded almost automatically.”
On Tuesday, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that his meeting with Putin would be postponed so as not to “waste” his time following indications that Russia and Ukraine were still too far apart to strike a peace deal.
The suspended meeting marked another abrupt turn in Trump’s public comments on the war, which in recent weeks have bounced from mulling over selling deep-strike Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine to a sudden cessation of pressure on Moscow after a phone conversation last week with Putin to, now, a chill in relations between the U.S. and Russia.
The idea of Tomahawks seemed to especially alarm the Kremlin, with Putin calling Trump just a day before a White House meeting with Zelensky. After the call, Trump dropped the talk of new missiles and urged Ukraine to give up territory for a deal. He also, however, called for freezing the lines on the battlefield - angering Russia.
Russia rejected Trump’s call for an immediate ceasefire on Tuesday. The freeze in fighting, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said, went against what he said was decided between the two countries in August in Alaska.
“If we just stop, it means forgetting the root causes of this conflict, which the American administration clearly understood,” Lavrov said, adding that it would leave “Nazis” in charge of Ukraine.
The Kremlin, which has frequently resorted to nuclear saber-rattling to try to deter Western support to Ukraine, also announced that Putin led a planned training exercise of Russia’s strategic nuclear forces Wednesday, which included the launch of ballistic missiles.
Publicly, Russia said planning for the summit was still underway. The Foreign Ministry was carrying out Putin’s orders to work on the details of preparations for a meeting, including “such issues as schedules, formats and sequence of steps,” according to Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov.
“Naturally, attempts are being made to present the situation as something different from what it was a week, two or three weeks ago,” he said. “I view this as a deliberate aspiration of the deal’s opponents to reduce the chances for its conclusion,” he said.
The Kremlin also said that its negotiating position, as articulated at the Alaska summit and elsewhere, had not changed. “Our position is well known to everyone. It has been clearly articulated by our president and is well understood,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday.
Although Trump has characterized Russia’s conditions for peace as keeping Ukraine out of NATO and territorial demands - or property as he has termed it - and has attributed the difficulties in settling the war to “bad blood” between Putin and Zelensky, Moscow’s core demands go much further.
These include setting the stage to remove Zelensky and his administration; stripping Ukraine of a substantial military; forcing Ukraine into close political and economic ties with Russia; denying Ukraine the right to join any alliances in the future; and making Russian an official state language.
Russian analyst Vladimir Pastukhov wrote on Telegram that Putin managed to convince Trump to put the cart before the horse when he got him to abandon pressure for a ceasefire at the Alaska summit.
When Trump reversed his position, “Moscow exploded - and this reaction is completely logical and predictable.” But he said Russia’s insistence that the Zelensky administration consisted of “Nazis” indicated its true position.
“Lavrov’s statement that a ceasefire without addressing the root causes of the conflict would leave most of Ukraine under Nazi rule sheds light on the essence of the disagreement between Putin and Trump and helps explain what is happening in the negotiations,” he said.
Mikhail Rostovsky, political columnist in pro-Kremlin tabloid newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets, wrote Tuesday that “Moscow has no reason to agree to a simple ceasefire.” Trump’s call to stop fighting “doesn’t suit Putin” who needed to gain time “to push Zelenskyy even further into the corner.”
Moscow “doesn’t plan to make any unilateral concessions. And this approach stands in stark contrast to what Trump wants,” which is to end as quickly as possible no matter how, so he could win a Nobel Peace Prize.
A last-minute trip to the White House by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte is planned for Wednesday, as European leaders again moved to shore up support for Ukraine.
In his Tuesday statement, Zelensky said he believed Ukraine’s ability to strike deep into Russia - threatening the logistics of the Kremlin’s war machine and incapacitating parts of its energy sector - could “hold the indispensable key to peace.”
“The greater Ukraine’s long-range reach, the greater Russia’s willingness to end the war,” Zelensky said. “The discussion on Tomahawks turned out to be a major investment in diplomacy - we forced Russia to reveal that Tomahawks are precisely the card they take seriously.”
As Wednesday dawned in Kyiv, the scenes were familiar from the past nearly four years of war. Ambulances rushed the injured to hospitals. Buildings smoldered. Workers tallied the damage and swept glass from shattered windows, glistening on the leaf-strewn ground.
In Kharkiv, a kindergarten was hit by a drone, killing one and injuring four, including one in intensive care.
In the village of Pohreby, near Kyiv, the bodies of a 12-year-old girl and a 6-month-old baby were found with their mother in a burned-out husk of a home.
“These strikes,” Zelensky posted Wednesday morning on Telegram, “are Russia’s slap in the face to everyone who insists on a peaceful solution.”
Abbas Gallyamov, a former speechwriter for Putin during his term as prime minister, said that Putin would have difficulty explaining to ordinary Russians why the war was ever necessary, if he failed to deliver his stated goals of totally transforming Ukraine.
“Let’s assume that the war will now stop on condition that Ukraine does not join NATO. This would in no way cover the fact that the Ukrainian armed forces are now armed to the teeth, incredibly angry at Russia, and - most importantly - no weaker than their Russian counterparts,” he wrote on Telegram.
“‘So what is the success? How will Donbas help us in this situation?’ asks the average Russian. Putin will have nothing to answer that question,” he added.
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Dixon and Abbakumova reported from Riga, Latvia. Serhii Korolchuk in Kyiv contributed to this report.