Trump and Putin spoke for more than two hours on Tuesday evening, and while the Russian president rejected Trump’s request for a full 30-day ceasefire, to which Ukraine had agreed last week in Jeddah, the pair agreed on a moratorium on strikes on energy and infrastructure targets.However, shortly after the call ended, air raid sirens sounded in Kyiv. About 45 drones attacked the region around the capital, and anti-aircraft fire was audible across the capital overnight.
Authorities said numerous houses and cars were damaged by drones that fell in Bucha and other areas around the capital, and two people were injured. In the eastern city of Sumy, a drone hit a hospital building requiring the evacuation of more than 100 patients. Ukraine also continued its long-range drone assaults on Russia overnight, apparently hitting an oil depot in the southern region of Krasnodar. Russia’s defence ministry claimed it destroyed 57 Ukrainian drones, the majority in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces have recently been withdrawing from a small chunk of territory they have occupied for the past seven months. In a separate incident, one civilian died in a nearby village. Meanwhile, Kramatorsk faced its round of violence, with reports of guided aerial bombs hitting residential neighborhoods. Bohdan Miroshnykov, a military correspondent, identified the aerial bomb used in the Slovyansk attack as a deliberate strike on the energy infrastructure. If upheld by both sides, a halt to attacks on energy infrastructure would mark the first partial ceasefire in more than three years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Russia has been relentlessly targeting Ukraine’s infrastructure for the past three years, while in recent months Ukraine has been increasingly able to hit targets deep inside Russia with long-range drones. In his first public appearance since the call, Trump told the Fox News interviewer “Right now you have a lot of guns pointing at each other and a ceasefire without going a little bit further would have been tough. Russia has the advantage. As you know, they have encircled about 2,500 soldiers. They are nicely encircled and that’s not good. And we want to get it over with.”
senior Russian officials signalled their satisfaction with Putin’s conversation with Trump. Kirill Dmitriev, a senior aide close to Putin, wrote on X: “It is official now – a PERFECT call.”
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