Russian drone strike kills 15 in Dnipro as Zelenskyy says more Russia-Ukraine talks next week
Ukraine’s largest private energy company, DTEK, stated that it was the owner of the bus and accused Russia of carrying out a “large-scale terrorist attack on DTEK mines in the Dnipropetrovsk region”, the capital of which is Dnipro.
“The epicenter of one of the attacks was a company bus transporting miners from the enterprise after shifts in the Dnipropetrovsk region,” the company said in a Telegram post. he said.
The attack came just days after US President Donald Trump said the Kremlin had agreed to temporarily halt attacks on Ukraine’s capital and other cities; because the region was affected by freezing temperatures, which brought great difficulties to Ukrainians.
Ukrainian Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal on Sunday called the strike in Dnipro a “cynical and targeted attack on energy sector workers” and said the incident occurred near the Ternivska mine in the east of the city.
Hours earlier, Ukraine’s emergency services reported that Russian attack drones injured six people at a maternity hospital in Zaporizhzhia, southern Ukraine, on Sunday morning. No peace talks on Sunday Meanwhile, envoys from Russia, Ukraine and the United States were expected to meet in Abu Dhabi on Sunday to resume talks aimed at ending Moscow’s all-out invasion of its neighbour. However, on Sunday morning, Zelenskyy announced that the meeting would be held next week instead.
“We have just received a report from our negotiating team. The dates for the next tripartite meetings have been set: February 4 and 5, Abu Dhabi. Ukraine is ready for substantive talks and we are interested in an outcome that will bring us closer to a real and honorable end to the war,” Zelenskyy said in a Telegram post. he said.
There has been no comment yet from US or Russian officials.
On Saturday afternoon, Russia’s top envoy Kirill Dmitriev said he had a “constructive meeting with the US peacemaking delegation” in Florida.
Officials have so far released few details about the talks in Abu Dhabi, which are part of a yearlong effort by the Trump administration to steer the parties to a peace deal and end an all-out war that has raged for almost four years.
Although Ukrainian and Russian officials accept Washington’s call for compromise in principle, Moscow and Kiev have deep differences over what the agreement should look like.
One of the key issues is whether Russia should retain the regions occupied by its own forces in Ukraine, especially the industrial region of Donbas in eastern Ukraine, or withdraw from these regions and take territory there that it has not yet captured.
Drones hit maternity hospital in Ukraine, Ukrainian emergency service reported. Early Sunday, Russian attack planes hit a maternity hospital in southern Ukraine.
A post on Telegram stated that the attack injured three women at the hospital in Zaporizhzhia and also sparked a fire in the gynecology reception area, which was later extinguished. The head of the regional administration, Ivan Fedorov, later said that the number of injured had risen to six.
The Kremlin confirmed on Friday that it had agreed to delay attacking Kiev until Sunday, but refused to disclose any details, making it difficult for an independent assessment of whether the conciliatory step had actually taken place.
Last week, Russia struck energy assets in the southern Ukrainian city of Odesa and Kharkiv in the northeast. Two people died and four people were injured in the attack that also hit the Kiev region on Wednesday.
By Sunday, Russia had launched 90 attack aircraft, including 14 at nine locations, Ukraine’s air force said in a Telegram post. A man and a woman were killed in an overnight drone attack in Dnipro, according to local government chairman Oleksandr Hanzha.
Russian shelling also hit the center of Kherson, a city in southern Ukraine, shortly after 7 a.m., seriously wounding a 59-year-old woman, according to a Facebook post by the municipal military administration.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said Sunday morning that its forces used operational-tactical aviation, attack drones, missile forces and artillery to strike transportation infrastructure used by Ukrainian forces.
A separate post on Sunday said Russian air defenses shot down 21 Ukrainian drones flying over southwestern and western Russia. There was no mention of any loss of life or damage.
