Oct 21 (Reuters) – Two Ukrainians over 80 years old were among four killed in overnight Russian attacks that also targeted energy facilities across four regions, officials said, hours after US President Donald Trump urged Kyiv to agree peace terms with Russia.
Relations between the United States and Ukraine have come under severe strain, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy reporting a hiatus in advance warnings of missile strikes and limitations on Elon Musk’s Starshield system.
Ukrainian police said two of the dead were in the capital Kyiv, where a drone slammed into an apartment building. Another two people – an 83-year-old man and an 81-year-old woman – were killed outside the northeasern city of Kharkiv, they added.
Prime Minister Sergii Koretskyi said Russia had attacked power facilities in the Kyiv, Volyn, Odesa and Mykolaiv regions, as well as civilian enterprises in at least two others.
A university building and shopping centre in central Ukraine were also struck, while injuries were reported in the Poltava, Lviv, Cherkassy and Chernihiv regions, he added.
Russia’s defence ministry said its forces had hit a warehouse complex used for drone storage in the central Ukrainian city of Poltava, and an electric power substation, which supplies power to Ukrainian defence and industrial sector as well as logistics centres in Kyiv.
It also said it had hit a ship carrying military cargo to Ukraine heading to the port of Odesa.
The strikes are part of a mounting campaign by Moscow to knock out the Ukrainian energy grid as winter approaches, despite a US-backed push to end the more than four-year war.
Trump urged Ukraine on Tuesday to make a deal to settle the conflict, and said Moscow wanted to get it done.
US special envoy Steve Witkoff is due to meet President Vladimir Putin for talks on Ukraine in St Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city on Wednesday. The governor of the Leningrad region surrounding the city said on Wednesday that Russian forces had shot down three drones over the region.
(Reporting by Dan Peleschuk; Editing by Philippa Fletcher)
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