Russian mass drone and missile attack on southern Ukraine kills 1 and wounds dozens

The Kremlin on Thursday said Russia remained interested in continuing peace talks, despite the air attack on Kyiv that day that was one of the largest and deadliest since Moscow’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

The attacks came less than two weeks after U.S. 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, as U.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 U.S. 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-kilometer (620-mile) frontline 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 that day by Russia’s Defense Ministry.

Since March, Moscow has taken more than 3,500 square kilometers (1,351 square miles) 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.

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 further northeast.

Falling drone debris sparked a fire at a refinery in the city of Krasnodar, regional Russian authorities confirmed Saturday. They later said the blaze had been 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 Sept. 30 and a partial ban affecting traders and intermediaries until Oct. 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 President 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.