Russia accused Kyiv of breaking a U.S.-brokered ceasefire on Sunday, while Ukrainian officials said that one person had been killed and more injured by Russian drone and artillery strikes in the past 24 hours.
Two people were injured by Ukrainian shelling in the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine’s Kherson region, the area’s Moscow-installed leader Vladimir Saldo said.
Separately, Russia’s Ministry of Defense accused Kyiv of committing more than 1,000 ceasefire violations, state media reported, citing a daily briefing on Sunday. The ministry said Ukrainian forces had attacked civilian targets in several Russian regions and carried out strikes against Russian military positions on the front line.
Russia’s military “responded in kind” to the ceasefire violations,” the ministry said.
Ukrainian officials said Russia had launched attacks, although they stopped short of accusing Moscow of violating the U.S.-brokered truce that came into force on Saturday.
Ivan Fedorov, head of Ukraine’s southeastern Zaporizhzhia region, said one person had been killed and three more injured by artillery and drone attacks in the past 24 hours.
Oleksandr Prokudin, the head of Ukraine’s Kherson, said that seven people had been wounded over the same period.
Five people were also injured when a Russian drone attack damaged a nine-storey apartment block in the industrial district of Ukraine’s second-largest city, Oleh Syniehubov, the head of the Kharkiv regional administration, said late Saturday.
U.S. President Donald Trump said Friday that Russia and Ukraine had bowed to his request for a ceasefire running Saturday through Monday to mark Victory Day, the Russian celebration marking the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Trump said there would also be an exchange of prisoners, declaring that the break in fighting could be the “beginning of the end” of the war.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who had said Russian authorities “fear drones may buzz over Red Square” during the May 9 parade in Moscow, followed up on Trump’s statement by mockingly declaring Red Square temporarily off-limits for Ukrainian strikes to allow the Russian parade to go ahead. The Kremlin shrugged off the comment as a “silly joke.”
Russian presidential aide Yuri Ushakov said on Sunday he expects U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner – who have both taken a leading role in negotiations to end the war – to visit Moscow “soon enough.”
However, he stressed that Moscow would not move from its demand that Kyiv’s troops withdraw from Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. “Until (Ukraine) takes that step, we can hold several more rounds, dozens of rounds (of negotiations), but we’ll be stuck in the same place,” Ushakov was cited by the state news agency Tass as saying.
___
Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia–ukraine
