Kyiv, Ukraine
CNN
—
US President Donald Trump said he is “not happy” after Russia launched its deadliest wave of attacks on Kyiv in nine months, telling President Vladimir Putin to “STOP!” as he attempts to push Ukraine to agree on a contentious ceasefire proposal.
Moscow sent 70 missiles and 145 drones toward Ukraine, mainly targeting Kyiv, in an attack that leader Volodymyr Zelensky said was aimed at pressuring the United States.
“I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV. Not necessary, and very bad timing. Vladimir, STOP! 5000 soldiers a week are dying. Let’s get the Peace Deal DONE!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Thursday.
Elaborating on the comments in the Oval Office later, Trump pledged that “things will happen” if Russian attacks continue.
At least 12 people died in the strikes with 90 injured, according to Ukraine’s emergency services, and more casualties may be trapped under rubble. The emergency services said Moscow’s assault struck 13 locations in Kyiv, including residential buildings and civilian infrastructure.
It was the costliest attack on the city since July 2024, when 33 people were killed in an aerial barrage that targeted a hospital and residential districts.
Zelensky said during a trip to South Africa that the bombardment was “first and foremost” aimed at “pressuring the US.” He sought to push back against Trump’s efforts to corral Kyiv into making concessions, telling reporters: “The fact that Ukraine is ready to sit down at a negotiating table after (a) full ceasefire with terrorists… is a big compromise.”
And Zelensky, who was speaking to reporters shortly before Trump’s social media post, sought to highlight imbalances in the administration’s stances towards Kyiv and Moscow.
“This is (an issue of) our survival. We are very direct and transparent in this matter,” the Ukrainian leader said. “I don’t see strong pressure against Russia and new strong sanctions packages against the Russian aggression for now.”
Speaking in the White House on Thursday, Trump acknowledged “a lot of hatred” between Ukraine and Russia, but insisted: “I think they both want to make peace, I do believe so.”
“We are thinking very strongly that they both want peace, but they have to get to the table – we’re waiting a long time, they have to get them to the table, and I think we’re going to get peace,” Trump told reporters in response to a CNN question during a lunch meeting with Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre.
Zelensky said Moscow’s latest attack was “one of the most complex, most daring attacks coming from Russia.” Russia’s defense ministry said it carried out “a massive strike with high-precision long-range air, land and sea-based weapons, unmanned aerial vehicles on enterprises of the aviation, missile and space, mechanical engineering and armored industries of Ukraine, production of rocket fuel and gunpowder.”
“The strike objectives were achieved. All targets were hit,” Moscow said.
A search and rescue operation is underway to find people caught under rubble, according to Ukrainian local and national authorities.
Preliminary information suggested the Russians used a missile manufactured in North Korea, Zelensky said on social media, with Ukrainian special services verifying the details. If confirmed, “this will be further proof of the criminal nature of the alliance between Russia and Pyongyang,” the Ukrainian leader said.
Following the attacks on Kyiv, Zelensky announced he was cutting short his visit to South Africa, where he landed late on Wednesday, to return to Ukraine.
“It is extremely important that everyone around the world sees and understands what is really happening” he said, adding that Ukraine would immediately contact its international partners regarding its requests to strengthen air defenses.
French President Emmanuel Macron strongly condemned the attacks, saying Putin needs to “stop lying.”
“He says “I want peace” and continues to bomb and kill in Ukraine,” Macron told reporters during a visit to Madagascar.
The French leader said it was important to reiterate to the US that there is “one aggressor: Russia and one aggressed: Ukraine,” saying that “America’s anger should be focused on one person: President Putin.”
Air raid sirens blasted through Kyiv for six hours in the early hours of Thursday, as the Russian barrage gripped the city in fear. A CNN producer said they waited in a corridor with their child as missiles rained on the city, with a drone flying audibly outside their window.
Sirens are a near daily occurrence in Kyiv, but Thursday’s strikes served as an unwelcome reminder of the anxiety that pulsed through the capital in the early phases of the war. Images provided by the emergency services showed buildings engulfed in flames at some of the sites struck in the attacks.
“The first thing I felt was fear,” Iryna Dzen, a resident of an affected neighbourhood, told CNN on Wednesday. “You don’t understand anything when you wake up at night from an explosion. You are alive, but your parents, children, you don’t know if they are alive, where was the hit.”
“We went to the corridor, it was safer there, and started calling our relatives (to find out) whether they were alive or not,” she said. “And when we came (outside) and saw everything, it was a horror.”
Engineers, rescue workers and recovery dogs were searching on Wednesday for people believed to be trapped under the rubble of a home destroyed by the strikes in the Sviatoshyn district, said Ukraine’s Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko.
“Rescuers are doing everything they can to clear the rubble as quickly as possible,” the mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Telegram. “We are currently clearing the rubble manually, we are not using any equipment because there may still be people under the rubble.”
Klymenko said eight regions of the country were targeted in what he called “a massive combined Russian attack” that also hit Zhytomyr, Dnipro, Kharkiv, Poltava, Khmelnytsky, Sumy and Zaporizhzhia.
Later on Thursday night, local administration officials told Russian state news agency TASS that a church complex in Russia’s Belgorod region burned down completely following a Ukrainian drone attack, but there were no casualties.
The Russian attacks followed a fresh public spat between Trump and Zelensky, specifically over the future of Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.
As part of its mission to seal a peace deal to end the three-year war, the US administration has proposed recognizing Russian control of Crimea, officials familiar with the details have told CNN.
Such a move would reverse a decade of US policy and could upset the widely held post-World War II consensus that international borders should not be changed by force.
Zelensky has repeatedly said Ukraine would not accept that, saying it would go against the country’s constitution. On Wednesday, Trump said Zelensky’s position was “very harmful to the Peace Negotiations with Russia.”
“It’s inflammatory statements like Zelenskyy’s that makes it so difficult to settle this War. He has nothing to boast about!” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform.
Hours after sitting down with Ukrainians and Europeans in London on Wednesday in a bid to advance US efforts, Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, told CNN that he believed this round of talks was “candid, positive, and productive.”
But another senior US official said that there was still a wide range of disagreements with Ukraine, including on the issue of sequencing and whether a ceasefire or an agreement on the Trump administration’s broad framework comes first.
Still, US officials are not counting out the possibility of a ceasefire even though they are pressing for Russia and Ukraine to agree to the framework they have put on the table.
