The attacks come as the Ukrainian war is at a critical point, with the United States having halted military aid and intelligence sharing with Kyiv as part of efforts to pressure it into accepting a peace agreement. The move has left Ukraine even more vulnerable to Russian attacks.
“This is what happens when someone appeases barbarians,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk wrote on X Saturday. “More bombs, more aggression, more victims. Another tragic night in Ukraine.”
Russian strikes on the eastern city of Dobropillia killed 11 people and wounded at least 50 – including seven children, in attacks that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said were “deliberately calculated to cause maximum damage.”
“It was one of the most brutal strikes, a combined one,” Zelensky said in his nightly address on Saturday. He described a double strike on Dobropillia, where the second one hit just as rescue workers arrived on scene to attend to the victims of the first.
On Friday, after threatening Russia with sanctions to force through a ceasefire, US President Donald Trump said that his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin was “doing what anybody else would do” in taking advantage of the current battlefield dynamics.
The White House also has suspended Ukraine’s access to commercial satellite imagery purchased by the US government through the company Maxar, spokespeople for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and Maxar said Friday.
Ukrainian authorities said that more people could be trapped under the rubble in Dobropillia, with at least eight residential buildings in the area damaged in the attack.
Zelensky accused Moscow of “thinking not about how to end the war, but about how to destroy and capture more” as long as the world “allows” the war to continue.
He said Kyiv continued to “actively communicate” with European countries and was “in constant contact with the American team” to coordinate efforts to end the war.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio held a call with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha on Friday and told him Trump was “determined to end the war as soon as possible and emphasized that all sides must take steps to secure a sustainable peace,” the State Department said.
Zelensky has said he will meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia next week ahead of negotiations between Kyiv and Washington. After that, his team will stay in Saudi Arabia “to work with our American partners,” he added.
Local officials said on Saturday that over the past day, Russian attacks had killed at least 23 people and wounded more than 50 in eastern and southern Ukraine.
In addition to those killed in Dobropillia, Russian attacks elsewhere in Donetsk killed nine others and wounded 13, according to local authorities.
Separately, a drone attack in the eastern Kharkiv region also killed three people and injured seven, Ukraine’s emergency service said, while five people were injured in attacks on the southern Kherson region, according to local officials.
Ukraine’s air force said it had shot down 79 out of 145 drones launched by Russia overnight, while 54 drones did not reach their target.
Russia also used at least three missiles in its attack, the air force said, adding that it shot down at least one of the projectiles.
The attacks came just days after a deadly Russian airstrike on Kryvyi Rih, the hometown of Zelensky.
Under pressure in Kursk
Meanwhile, Ukraine is under severe pressure in the Russian region of Kursk and may soon lose a key logistical support route to its forces, according to Ukrainian and Russian military bloggers, after the arrival of fresh North Korean troops bolstered Russia’s offensive operations inside its own borders.
Ukraine launched a shock incursion into Kursk in August – the first ground invasion of Russia by a foreign power since World War II – in the hope that it could divert Russian troops from eastern Ukraine and improve its hand ahead of potential ceasefire negotiations.
Although the invasion may have slowed Russia’s offensive in Ukraine, Kyiv has since lost about half of the territory it once occupied in Kursk. Moscow has called in foreign reinforcements and deployed some 12,000 North Korean troops to the region, according to Ukrainian officials and Western intelligence reports.
This week, military bloggers from both countries have warned that Ukraine’s hold on the territory is more tenuous than at any point since it launched the incursion, with Moscow’s forces entering Ukraine’s Sumy region and threatening to cut off Kyiv’s troops in Kursk.
This story has been updated with additional information.
