Ukraine says Russian overnight strikes kill six; Putin–Trump summit shelved

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By Pavel Polityuk

KYIV (Reuters) -Russian missile and drone attacks on Ukraine killed six people, including two children, and forced power outages nationwide, officials said on Wednesday, as plans for a summit of Russian and U.S. leaders were shelved after Moscow rejected a ceasefire.

Debris from downed weapons strewed the Ukrainian capital, sparking fires in half its districts, Timur Tkachenko, head of Kyiv’s military administration, said on the Telegram messaging app.

“Ukraine long ago agreed to the U.S. proposal for a ceasefire, while Moscow is doing everything to keep the killing going,” Zelenskiy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, said in a Telegram post after the newest Russian attacks.

“This means collective actions against Putin are currently insufficient, and we must all do more together to make him stop killing our people.”

The comments came after the White House on Tuesday put on hold a planned summit of U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin after Moscow rejected calls for an immediate ceasefire.

A senior U.S. official told Reuters there were no plans for a meeting soon.

Two people were killed in the Kyiv attack, while four, including two children, died in the aftermath of Russian strikes on the surrounding region, Ukraine’s emergency service said.

Ten people were rescued from a fire in a high-rise building in Kyiv’s district of Dniprovskyi, said Mayor Vitali Klitschko, with a child among the five admitted to hospital across the city.

Officials said fires also broke out in the districts of Desnianskyi, Darnytskyi and Pecherskyi, the last home to the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra monastery, a symbol of Ukrainian spiritual and cultural history.

Ukrainian officials said the attacks ran through most of the night and early Wednesday, initially with ballistic missiles and subsequently drone strikes.

There was no immediate comment from Russia.

ENERGY FACILITIES TARGETED AGAIN

“All night the enemy struck the country’s energy infrastructure,” Energy Minister Svitlana Hrynchuk said on Telegram, with no details.

In a separate post, the ministry said there were emergency power outages in most regions of Ukraine, as a result of the Russian attack on energy infrastructure, including in the city of Kyiv and the region surrounding it.

In the central region of Poltava, oil and gas facilities were damaged in the Myrhorod district by the Russian attack, the regional governor said.

In the frontline southeastern region of Zaporizhzhia, which has been subject to continued strikes and shelling by Russian forces, 13 people were wounded in overnight attacks, regional governor Ivan Fedorov said on Wednesday.

Russia has consistently hit Ukrainian energy facilities since launching a full-scale invasion of the country in 2022, maintaining they are a legitimate military target in the war.

A Tuesday attack on Ukraine killed four and left hundreds of thousands without power and many without water in what Kyiv said was Moscow’s latest salvo in a campaign to break its neighbour’s energy system ahead of winter.

(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk and Sergiy Karazy in Kyiv and Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Writing by Lidia Kelly; Editing by Thomas Derpinghaus and Clarence Fernandez.)