Russian attacks kill three and cut power to freezing Ukrainian regions

Original article by Shaun Walker in Warsaw and Pjotr Sauer

A massive Russian drone and missile attack on Ukraine has killed three people and cut power to several Ukrainian regions two days before Christmas and as the country enters a period of very cold weather.

Russia sent more than 650 drones and more than 30 missiles into Ukraine in the attack, which began overnight and continued into Tuesday morning, local officials said. At least three people were killed, including a four-year-old child.

Poland scrambled fighter jets to protect its airspace during the strike, the country’s army said in a statement.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said in a post on Telegram: “A strike before Christmas, when people want to be with their families, at home, in safety. A strike, in fact, in the midst of negotiations that are being conducted to end this war. Putin cannot accept the fact that we must stop killing.”

Meanwhile, Ukraine pressed on with strikes against Russian oil and gas infrastructure, hitting a petrochemical plant in southern Russia’s Stavropol region.

Footage circulating on Russian media channels showed towering flames in the industrial area, which the regional governor, Vladimir Vladimirov, said had been engulfed by a fire.

The strikes follow weekend negotiations in Miami involving Donald Trump’s peace envoy, Steve Witkoff, and representatives from Russia and Ukraine, who each held separate meetings with Witkoff and Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Witkoff called the discussions “constructive” but there was no sign the talks were any closer to bringing lasting peace.

Zelenskyy said in a statement that he was briefed on the state of the talks on Tuesday morning and that “several draft documents have now been prepared”, including an outline for ending the war, options for Ukraine’s future security guarantees and plans for the country’s postwar reconstruction.

Ukraine has engaged its European allies to help hammer out a compromise agreement with the US, although Zelenskyy has said the issue of territorial concessions remained a sticking point. There is no sign that Russia is even close to signing up to the package of agreements Kyiv and Washington have arrived at, despite repeated positive messaging from the White House that peace is close.

“Slow progress is being observed,” the Russian deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, told state media after the talks. However, Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, has said many times that Russia will agree only to a deal that addresses what he sees as the “root causes” of the conflict – a sweeping set of demands that would in effect erode Ukraine’s sovereignty.

Putin’s spokesperson struck a downbeat tone on Tuesday, telling Russian media that the latest round of talks had not produced a breakthrough.

Russia has continued to hit Ukrainian energy infrastructure as the talks go on, apparently in the hope of making conditions harder for the population and breaking Ukrainian resolve. Tuesday’s attack, which the energy operator Ukrenergo said was the ninth mass attack on energy infrastructure of the season, left three western regions of Ukraine “almost completely without power”, it said.

Kyiv and many other cities have been experiencing scheduled power cuts for weeks as the grid struggles to cope with reduced capacity during the winter months. Temperatures have dropped below freezing in many parts of Ukraine, with a high of -5C forecast for Kyiv on Wednesday.

Reports suggested a toddler was killed in the north-western Zhytomyr region on Tuesday, while a drone killed a woman close to Kyiv. Authorities in several western regions reported damage to energy infrastructure.

Russia struck a series of infrastructure targets in the southern city of Odesa and damaged more than 100 houses, according to local officials. Russia has been attacking the port city relentlessly over recent weeks, leading to sustained power shortages.