KYIV: Russia launched a large aerial attack on southern Ukraine, officials said Saturday, two days after a rare airstrike on central Kyiv killed 23 and damaged European Union diplomatic offices as US-led efforts to end the three-year war staggered.Among other locations hit, the assault overnight into Saturday struck a five-story residential building, killing at least one civilian and wounding 28 people, including children, in the Zaporizhzhia region, Gov Ivan Fedorov reported.Russia launched 537 strike drones and decoys, as well as 45 missiles, according to Ukraine’s air force. Ukrainian forces shot down or neutralised 510 drones and decoys and 38 missiles, it said.The Kremlin on Thursday said Russia remained interested in continuing peace talks, despite the air attack on Kyiv that was one of the largest and deadliest since Moscow’s full-scale invasion in 2022.The attacks came less than two weeks after US President Donald Trump met Russia’s Vladimir Putin for a summit in Alaska, a meeting that marked the end of Putin’s diplomatic isolation in the West but yielded few details on how the war might end.Thursday’s strike was one of the few times Russian drones and missiles have penetrated the heart of the Ukrainian capital. Children were among the dead, and search and rescue efforts continued for hours to pull people from the rubble.Hours after the attack, the United States approved an $825 million arms sale to Ukraine that will include extended-range missiles and related equipment to boost its defensive capabilities. Washington’s efforts to broker peace between Ukraine and Russia appear to have stalled. Russia accused of slow-walking peace talks as its troops press on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday expressed frustration with what he called Russia’s lack of constructive engagement.Ukraine has accepted a US proposal for a ceasefire and a meeting between Putin and Zelenskyy, but Moscow has raised objections. Trump said Friday he expects to decide on next steps in two weeks if direct talks aren’t scheduled between the two leaders.Meanwhile, Ukraine’s European allies have accused Putin of dragging his feet in peace efforts and avoiding serious negotiations while Russian troops move deeper into the country.Moscow’s forces are waging a “nonstop” offensive along almost the whole 1,000-kilometre front line in Ukraine, and have the “strategic initiative,” the chief of Russia’s general staff said Saturday. Valery Gerasimov’s address to his deputies was published by Russia’s Defence Ministry.Since March, Moscow has taken more than 3,500 square kilometres of Ukrainian territory, and captured 149 settlements, Gerasimov said. It was not immediately possible to verify the situation on the battlefield.Russian forces this month broke into Ukraine’s southeastern Dnipropetrovsk region, a Ukrainian military official said Wednesday, pressing into an eighth Ukrainian province in a possible bid to strengthen the Kremlin’s negotiating hand. Gerasimov on Saturday said Moscow’s troops have so far taken seven settlements in Dnipropetrovsk.EU officials mull how to make Russia pay for invasion European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the EU was advancing toward seizing frozen Russian assets to hand to Ukraine.“It’s clear that the predator has to pay for what he did,” she said, referring to Putin.Von der Leyen spoke Saturday in Estonia in a joint news conference with Prime Minister Kristen Michal, while on a four-day tour tour of European states bordering Russia or its ally Belarus.Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief, said that “everyone agrees that Russia should pay for the damages, not our taxpayers,” but that there was disagreement within the EU about confiscating the assets.Belgian Foreign Minister Maxime Prevot said his government opposed the move, as it “would trigger a system financial instability, and also erodes trusts in the euro.” He said the assets should remain frozen until Russia pays Ukraine reparations.Kallas and Prevot spoke during a summit of EU foreign and defense ministers in Copenhagen. Over two days on Friday and Saturday, EU officials discussed sanctions on Russia, ramping up defense supplies to Kyiv, postwar security guarantees and Ukraine’s prospects for joining the 27-nation bloc. Ukraine hits more Russian oil refineries Separately, Ukraine has continued to strike oil refineries inside Russia that it says have supplied Moscow’s war effort, the Ukrainian general staff reported Saturday. It said two facilities were hit overnight: in the Krasnodar region near occupied Crimea, and the Samara region farther northeast.Falling drone debris sparked a fire at a refinery in the city of Krasnodar, regional Russian authorities confirmed Saturday. They said the blaze was extinguished, damaging one of the facility’s processing units but causing no casualties. The Krasnodar refinery produces approximately 3 million tons per year of petroleum products such as gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel.A separate drone strike caused a fire at the Syzran Oil Refinery in the Samara province, according to the Ukrainian general staff.Gas stations have run dry in some regions of Russia after Ukrainian drones struck oil infrastructure in recent weeks, with motorists waiting in long lines and officials resorting to rationing or cutting off sales altogether. To try to ease the shortage, Russia has paused gasoline exports, with officials Wednesday declaring a full ban until September 30 and a partial ban affecting traders and intermediaries until October 31.Analysts expect the gasoline crisis to ease by late September as demand subsides and the annual summer maintenance for many refineries is finished. Still, the shortages have highlighted a vulnerability on the homefront that Ukraine could exploit further as drone warfare evolves. Former Ukrainian lawmaker shot dead In a separate development, Ukraine’s former parliament speaker and a prominent pro-Western politician was shot dead in the city of Lviv on Saturday, according to statements by Zelenskyy and local authorities.Little is known so far about the perpetrator, or why Andriy Parubiy was targeted. Zelenskyy decried Parubiy’s “terrible murder,” and vowed to open an investigation.Parubiy, 54, was a lawmaker from the Lviv region who participated in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004 and led self-defense volunteer units during the Maidan protests of 2014, which forced pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych from office. He was parliament speaker from 2016 to 2019.
