Russian Drone, Artillery Attacks Kill Three Across Ukraine

Russian drone and artillery attacks killed three people across several regions of Ukraine on Thursday night and into Friday, AFP reported. The aerial campaign that has defined the war's latest phase shows no sign of abating.

A 75-year-old man was killed in the southern city of Kherson in a drone strike on Thursday evening, according to the head of the city's military administration, Yaroslav Shanko. In Zaporizhzhia, a woman died in a separate drone attack that also left 16 people wounded, emergency services confirmed.

A further fatality was reported in the Pavlograd district of Dnipropetrovsk region, where a woman was killed in combined drone and artillery strikes, regional governor Oleksandr Ganzha said on Telegram. In Konotop in northeastern Ukraine, three children were wounded in Russian strikes, according to the city's mayor.

Both sides reported significant drone activity through the night. Russia's defence ministry said it had intercepted and destroyed 123 Ukrainian drones across various regions in the preceding hours. Ukraine's air force said it had shot down 198 Russian drones overnight — figures that, even allowing for the customary inflation of such claims on both sides, point to the sheer scale and tempo of the aerial campaign being waged in both directions.

The Broader Context

Russia has been striking Ukrainian cities, infrastructure and civilian areas with drones and missiles since 2022, and continues to occupy large swathes of southern and eastern Ukraine. US-led diplomatic efforts to bring the conflict — now in its fifth year — to a negotiated end remain stalled, with no meaningful progress reported in recent weeks. In the absence of a political framework, both sides have been escalating their aerial operations, trading nightly barrages across a front line that has shifted only incrementally despite enormous losses on both sides.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky today published an open letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin calling for direct bilateral talks to end the war, warning the Russian leader that his resources are shrinking and that history will not judge him kindly for a conflict he chose to start.

On the diplomatic track, Zelensky rejected any suggestion of travelling to Moscow and said Ukraine would not hide behind technical working groups or shuttle diplomacy. The front line today, he wrote, is where negotiations must begin.