Russia launched a wide drone attack across Ukraine overnight into Sunday (April 27), striking multiple regions and killing people. One was killed and a 14-year-old girl was injured in Pavlohrad, in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, regional governor Serhii Lysak said. The region has now been attacked for three nights in a row.
The drone attacks came as Moscow asserted it had completed its recapture of territory within Russia’s Kursk province previously occupied by Ukrainian troops as part of an August surprise assault. Ukrainian authorities disagreed, continuing to assert battles continued in the region.
Russia used 149 drones and decoys in the attack, with 57 shot down and a further 67 electronically jammed, said the Ukrainian air force. There were other reports of injuries elsewhere in the country, with one wounded in the Odesa region and another hurt in the city of Zhitomir.
At the same time, Russia’s Defence Ministry announced that it had downed five Ukrainian drones above the Bryansk border area and three more over Crimea, annexed by Moscow in 2014. In the Russian-controlled Donetsk region, five were injured after Ukrainian shelling of Horlivka, the city’s Russian-installed mayor Ivan Prikhodko said.
Diplomatically, US President Donald Trump also expressed fresh doubt regarding Russian President Vladimir Putin’s desire to pursue an end to the war. While on his way back from Rome, where he attended the funeral of Pope Francis and briefly met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump criticized the recent Russian shelling of civilian targets. He indicated that there might be the imposition of fresh sanctions against Moscow, pointing to a firmer US line.
The brief Trump-Zelenskyy meeting marked the leaders’ first in-person encounter since a tense Oval Office meeting earlier this year regarding US support for Ukraine.
