Couple killed near Kyiv and apartment block hit while US says territorial issue of Donetsk ‘very difficult’ to resolve. What we know on day 1,436
Russia has hit cities across Ukraine with drones and a missile, killing a couple near the capital of Kyiv one day after five people died in an attack on a passenger train. The attack came ahead of a fresh round of peace talks due at the weekend. Officials said four people, including two children, sought medical attention after the strikes overnight to Wednesday. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the attack on the apartment block, as well as another strike with short-range rockets on what he described as a residential area without military targets in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia. “We will respond fairly to Russia for this and other similar attacks,” he wrote on social media. Russian strikes on other locations across the country included the southern port city of Odesa as well as the central city of Kryvyi Rih.
The territorial issue of Donetsk is “very difficult” to resolve, the US secretary of state has said, saying there is active work under way to reconcile the issue at US-mediated talks to end Russia’s war in Ukraine. “It’s still a bridge we have to cross,” Marco Rubio said on Wednesday. “It’s still a gap, but at least we’ve been able to narrow down the issue set to one central one, and it will probably be a very difficult one,” he told a US Senate foreign relations committee hearing, referring to the eastern Ukrainian region where Moscow wants Kyiv to surrender land. Rubio said the US may the join the new Russia-Ukraine talks this week but that said US participation would be more junior than last week when Donald Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner joined negotiations in Abu Dhabi that were Ukrainian and Russian officials’ first face-to-face talks on Trump’s plan to end the war.
