(Reuters) – Russia’s large overnight drone attack on east, south and central Ukraine injured at least five people and damaged civilian infrastructure and businesses, Ukrainian officials said early on Wednesday.
The full scale of the attacks, which kept Kyiv and the eastern half of Ukraine awake for several hours around midnight, was not immediately known.
The strikes came as both Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy have signalled that they would be willing to negotiate a pact that would ban striking civilian infrastructure.
If bilateral talks occur, it would be the first time the two sides had held direct negotiations since the early days of the war, which Russia began with a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
European and U.S. officials will meet with a Ukrainian delegation on Wednesday in London for further peace talks, following their Paris meeting last week. At the meeting, Washington is expecting Ukraine’s answer to a peace framework that requires Kyiv to accept Russian occupation, Axios reported.
“A massive Russian drone attack on Poltava: three people injured,” Ukraine’s emergency service said in a post on Telegram messaging app, referring to the central Ukrainian region. “Solely the city’s civilian infrastructure was under enemy attacks.”
Several fires broke out and residential buildings, enterprises, warehouses, and garages were damaged, the emergency service said, posting photos of firefighters battling flames at night.
Two people were injured in a drone attack on civilian infrastructure in the suburbs of the Black Sea port city of Odesa, which also sparked several fires, Oleh Kiper, governor of the southern Ukraine Odesa region, said on Telegram.
Large-scale fires also broke out as a result of a Russian drone attack on Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, Mayor Ihor Terekhov said on Telegram.
Air defence units were also engaged in repelling attacks on the Kyiv region, but there were no reports of potential damages.
There was no immediate comment from Russia about the attacks.
Dmitry Milyaev, governor of Russia’s Tula region, which borders the Moscow region to its north, said that air defence units destroyed several Ukrainian drones. There was no information about damage or potential injuries, he said on Telegram.
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Editing by Chris Reese and Gerry Doyle)
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