Russia targets Ukraine with more than 200 drones in daytime assault

Russia targeted Ukraine with more than 200 drones in a large-scale daytime assault on Wednesday, hours after a previous barrage of civilian areas had killed at least eight people.

The strikes came as Kyiv and Moscow traded long-range attacks after a brief ceasefire, and despite the latest suggestion from Donald Trump that the war could soon come to an end.

Ukrainian monitors detected at least eight salvoes of Russian drones, including some entering from Belarus, with the apparent target being Kyiv’s critical infrastructure.

Ukraine’s president, Volodomyr Zelenskyy, who was visiting Romania on Wednesday, wrote on X: “Russia continues its strikes and is doing so brazenly – deliberately targeting our railway infrastructure and civilian sites in our cities.”

In an apparent reference to world attention being focused on the Iran war, he wrote: “It is important to support Ukraine and not remain silent about Russia’s war. Every time the war disappears from the top of the news, it encourages Russia to become even more savage.”

Debris from a Ukrainian drone attack caused a fire at a gas processing plant in Russia’s southern Astrakhan region on Wednesday, the local governor said.

Trump’s latest claims of progress in negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow were offered with scant detail and follow similar unfounded claims. “The end of the war in Ukraine I really think is getting very close,” the US president told reporters as he left the White House for a summit in Beijing. “Believe it or not, it’s getting closer.”

His comments follow remarks by Vladimir Putin in a speech last weekend that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was possibly coming to an end.

The latest strikes came a day after one of Zelenskyy’s top aides, Andriy Yermak, appeared in a Kyiv court after Ukraine’s two anti-corruption agencies named him as a suspect in a money-laundering scheme.

He was a close friend of Zelenskyy’s for years, and led Ukraine’s talks with the US until an anti-corruption raid on his flat last November prompted his resignation. Yermak’s lawyer has described allegations that the former head of the presidential office had been caught up in a corruption scandal surrounding a $10.5m (£7.8m) luxury construction project as baseless.

Yermak told reporters before the hearing: “I do not have any house, I only have one flat and one car,” adding later that he would comment afterwards.

Russia’s earlier strikes had targeted Ukraine’s residential and railway infrastructure in the central Dnipro and north-eastern Kharkiv regions, port infrastructure in the southern Odesa region and energy facilities in the central Poltava region, according to Zelenskyy. Fourteen regions had come under attack on Tuesday, he said.

The correlation of forces in the war has shifted in recent months. Ukraine has gone from pleading for international help with its defence to offering other countries expertise on how to counter attacks thanks to its domestically developed drone technology.

Ukraine’s long-range drone and missile attacks have disrupted energy and manufacturing facilities deep inside Russia. Three regions reported strikes Wednesday.

Russia’s defence ministry said it had intercepted and destroyed 286 Ukrainian drones over Russia, the illegally annexed Crimea peninsula, the Azov Sea and the Black Sea.

On the 780-mile (1,250-kilometre) frontline, the advance of Russia’s bigger and better-equipped army has been slowing each month since last October, according to the Institute for the Study of War. Moscow’s spring offensive has floundered and its forces recorded a net loss of territory last month for the first time since 2024, the Washington-based thinktank said.

“Not only are Ukrainian defensive lines holding, but Ukrainian forces have managed to contest the tactical initiative in several areas of the front line even as Russia continues to lose disproportionate amounts of manpower to achieve minimal gains,” it said on Tuesday.