Kyiv, Ukraine
—
Several regions of Ukraine withstood overnight attacks by Russian drones and missiles targeting energy infrastructure, leaving more than 1 million homes without power, the Interior Ministry said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russia used more than 450 drones and more than 30 missiles, damaging more than a dozen civilian facilities in the country overnight from Friday to Saturday.
Zelenskiy added: “It’s important for everyone to see now what Russia is doing, every step of the terrorist acts against our people, every attack, because this is clearly not about ending the war.”
Local authorities said the airstrike injured several civilians and caused water outages in many areas.
Interior Minister Ihor Klimenko said the airstrike dealt a “severe blow to Ukraine’s energy sector”, particularly affecting Odessa and Mykolaiv oblasts.
The attack came as U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff prepared to meet with Zelensky and European officials in Berlin for talks to advance U.S. plans for a peace settlement in the nearly four-year war.
Russia has focused on crippling Ukraine’s energy infrastructure as winter sets in, and in recent months has been able to hit more targets by firing a combination of hundreds of drones and missiles simultaneously.
In Odessa, “the targets were ports and energy facilities. The enemy attacked the port of Odessa and caused a fire in a grain storage facility,” said Oleksiy Kuleba, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister and minister of community and territorial development.
DTEK, Ukraine’s largest electricity company, announced that 20 substations in the Odessa region were damaged. Video provided by DTEK showed workers beginning to clear debris at one of the affected substations.
Kuleba added that more than 140,000 customers were affected by power outages in the city of Kherson in the southern part of the regional capital. Local officials said water supply had been cut to four hours a day while restoration work continued.
Oleksandr Senkevich, mayor of the neighboring city of Mykolaiv, said the airstrike was “one of the most recent attacks on Mykolaiv and the region,” adding that five people were injured.
In the north, Chernihiv was attacked more than 30 times in one night, according to Vyacheslav Chaus, head of the regional military administration.
Meanwhile, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that more than 40 Ukrainian drones were intercepted during the night. Two people were killed in attacks on apartments in the southern city of Saratov, regional governor Roman Busargin said.
A Russian attack on a port in the Odessa region damaged three Turkish-owned ships on Friday, a Ukrainian navy spokesman said.
Germany is expected to host U.S. envoy Witkoff as well as European and Ukrainian delegations in the coming days for further negotiations on a U.S.-backed plan to end the war.
After talks between European, American and Ukrainian officials in Paris on Friday, France said Europe, the United States and Ukraine must agree on a common position in peace talks with Russia.
“It is up to the United States to use its power and technology to persuade Russia that this option of strengthening the common ground between Ukraine and the United States is actually peace-building,” the French presidential palace said in a statement.
The Americans “claim territorial issues, while the Ukrainians and Europeans argue security issues, and that needs to be balanced,” the president’s office said.
He added: “Ukrainians have no agreement on this territory, and today we are not considering any agreement on the territory, nor are we considering the DMZ (demilitarized zone).” The presidential palace said at a press conference that what happened on the territory was related to national security.
Russian state media said on Friday that Russia had not seen the new peace plan resulting from talks between Europe, the United States and Ukraine, adding that it might not like it.
Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said: “What the US is currently coordinating with Europe and Ukraine will ultimately have to be shown to us. This will naturally cause a corresponding reaction. I don’t think we will be completely satisfied with it either.”
The Ukrainian counterattack, rare on the front lines, inflicted heavy losses on Russian forces in the Kharkov region, Ukrainian military and analysts said.
At the same time, the Ukrainian military continues to resist a Russian offensive aimed at seizing Pokrovsk, a key stronghold in the Donetsk region, top military commander Oleksandr Shirushkyi said on Saturday.
Russian forces were conducting “offensive operations along virtually the entire line of contact,” he said. “There are days when the number of battles reaches 300, the highest since the war began.”
In Kharkov, the Ukrainians said they had driven Russian troops out of the town of Kupiansk. The Khaltiya Corps reported that more than 1,000 Russians had been killed and nearly 300 wounded in counterattacks by Ukrainian military units since September.
Hartiya Corps added that more than 200 Russian soldiers are currently surrounded.
Location-based video released Friday showed Ukrainian forces operating throughout the town.
Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed last month that Kupiansk had been captured and besieged by remnants of Ukrainian forces.
Commenting on the Kupiansk operation, analysts at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said Russian President Vladimir Putin and senior Russian military officials were “trying to portray the Ukrainian front as on the verge of collapse.” However, counterattacks on the Ukrainian side and “resistance on the rest of the front show that this narrative is false.”
Shirschiky said the situation in Pokrovsk and the neighboring town of Mirnohrad remained difficult as the Russian military was transferring additional troops to the region.
“In the past few weeks, we have been able to regain control of approximately 16 square kilometers in the north of the city,” Silsky claimed.
