KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A large Russian drone-and-missile attack targeted Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv on Saturday, killing at least three people and wounding 21 others, according to local officials, as hopes for peace dimmed further.
The warring sides also accused each other of trying to sabotage a planned prisoner exchange, nearly a week after Kyiv embarrassed the Kremlin with a surprising drone attack on military airfields deep inside Russia.
Saturday’s barrage — the latest in near daily widescale attacks on Ukraine — included aerial glide bombs that have become part of a fierce Russian onslaught in the all-out war, which began on Feb. 24, 2022.
Kharkiv residents describe fiery trap
As firefighters and emergency workers bustled around attack sites in Kharkiv, residents described the strikes that damaged their homes and nearly took their lives on Saturday morning.
Alina Belous said that she had tried to extinguish flames with buckets of water to rescue a young girl trapped inside a burning building who had called out for help.
“We were trying to put it out ourselves with our buckets, together with our neighbors. Then the rescuers arrived and started helping us put out the fire, but there was smoke and they worried that we couldn’t stay there. When the ceiling started falling off, they took us out,” she said.
Local resident Vadym Ihnachenko said that he thought at first that it was a neighboring building going up in flames.
“But when we saw sparks coming from the top, we realized it was our building,“ he said.
‘More pressure on Moscow is required’
Ukraine’s air force said that Russia struck with 215 missiles and drones overnight, and Ukrainian air defenses shot down 87 drones and seven missiles.
Several other areas in Ukraine were also hit, including the regions of Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, and the city of Ternopil, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said in an X post.
“To put an end to Russia’s killing and destruction, more pressure on Moscow is required, as are more steps to strengthen Ukraine,” he said.
The Russian Defense Ministry on Saturday said that its forces carried out a nighttime strike on Ukrainian military targets, including ammunition depots, drone assembly workshops, and weaponry repair stations. There was no comment from Moscow on the reports of casualties in Kharkiv.
Kharkiv’s mayor, Ihor Terekhov, said that the strikes also damaged 18 apartment buildings and 13 private homes. Terekhov said that it was “the most powerful attack” on the city since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Children among the wounded
Kharkiv’s regional governor, Oleh Syniehubov, said two districts in the city were struck with three missiles, five aerial glide bombs and 48 drones. Among the wounded were two children, a baby boy and a 14-year old girl, he added.
Six people are believed to be trapped under the rubble of an industrial facility in Kharkiv’s Kyiv district, The Kharkiv prosecutor’s office said in a statement on Telegram. Contact with those trapped was lost and rescue attempts have been ongoing since early afternoon, it said, without naming the facility.
In the Dnipropetrovsk province further south, two women, ages 45 and 88, were wounded, according to local Gov. Serhii Lysak.
Meanwhile, Russia’s defense ministry said that its forces shot down 36 Ukrainian drones overnight, over the country’s south and west, including near the capital. Drone debris wounded two civilians in the suburbs of Moscow, local Gov. Andrei Vorobyov reported.
No breakthrough on a peace deal
On Friday, Russia struck six Ukrainian territories, killing at least six people and wounding about 80. Among the dead were three emergency responders in Kyiv, one person in Lutsk and two people in Chernihiv.
A U.S.-led diplomatic push for a settlement has brought two rounds of direct peace talks between delegations from Russia and Ukraine, though the negotiations delivered no significant breakthroughs. The sides remain far apart on their terms for an end to the fighting.
Ukraine has offered an unconditional 30-day ceasefire and a meeting between its Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to break the deadlock. But the Kremlin has effectively rejected a truce and hasn’t budged from its demands.
U.S. President Donald Trump said this week that Putin told him Moscow would respond to Ukraine’s attack on Russian military airfields on June 1.
Trump also said that it might be better to let Ukraine and Russia “fight for a while” before pulling them apart and pursuing peace. Trump’s comments were a remarkable detour from his often-stated appeals to stop the war and signaled that he may be giving up on recent peace efforts.
Prisoner swap called into question
Later on Saturday, Russia and Ukraine each accused the other of endangering plans to swap 6,000 bodies of soldiers killed in action, agreed upon during direct talks in Istanbul on Monday that otherwise made no progress towards ending the war.
Vladimir Medinsky, a Putin aide who led the Russian delegation, said that Kyiv called a last-minute halt to an imminent swap. In a Telegram post, Medinsky said that refrigerated trucks carrying more than 1,200 bodies of Ukrainian troops from Russia had already reached the agreed exchange site at the border when the news came.
In response, Ukraine said Russia was playing “dirty games” and manipulating facts. According to the main Ukrainian authority dealing with such swaps, no date had been set for repatriating the bodies. In a statement Saturday, the agency also accused Russia of submitting lists of prisoners of war for repatriation that didn’t correspond to agreements reached on Monday.
It wasn’t immediately possible to reconcile the conflicting claims.
Monday’s talks unfolded a day after a string of stunning long-range attacks by both sides, with Ukraine launching the devastating drone assault on Russian air bases, and Moscow launching its largest drone attack of the war against Ukraine.
Ukraine’s Security Service on Saturday released a video said to show its audacious attack on Russian air fields Sunday in which Kyiv said that 41 Russian military aircraft was destroyed.
The video shows the flight path of one explosive-laden first person view, or FPV, drone — from takeoff from the roof of a modular building to the Belaya air field — where it appears to strike a Russian strategic bomber. Other aircraft are seen engulfed in flames, apparently from previous hits in Ukraine’s “Operation Spiderweb.”
A previous round of negotiations in Istanbul, the first time Russian and Ukrainian negotiators sat at the same table since the early weeks of the full-scale invasion, led to 1,000 prisoners on both sides being exchanged.
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Joanna Kozlowska contributed to this report from London.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
