One week ago Donald Trump announced that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to stop hitting each other’s power plants. On Sunday Volodymyr Zelensky presented his own tally of that week: 76 Russian attacks on Ukraine’s electricity, oil and gas facilities. Moscow, he said, wants nothing less than a nationwide blackout before winter.
The latest wave came overnight. Electrical substations across four regions, from Odesa on the Black Sea to Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr and Khmelnytskyi further north-west, were hit. Whole districts went dark while repair crews worked until morning. Attacks on housing left two dead and a dozen injured, two of them children. Zelensky’s weekly figures read like an inventory: close to 2,700 drones, some 1,700 glide bombs and 66 missiles, the majority of those ballistic. His message to Washington: Moscow is answering sanctions relief and deals with more bombs, not concessions.
Kyiv denied ever signing up to the truce in the first place, saying only that it would respect one if Russia did. Since then Kyiv’s long-range drones have gone back to work against Russian fuel sites.
Speaking on American television on Sunday, Zelensky also thanked the US for switching American intelligence on incoming ballistic missiles back on after a three-day pause. In the same breath he repeated his claim that the recent slowdown of Starlink terminals in Ukraine had been a deliberate signal from the US government, with SpaceX merely pulling the lever. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hit back on the same programme, calling that accusation “very reckless” and insisting nobody in the administration had ordered it.
There was an awkward moment closer to home as well. An unidentified flying object over Lithuania triggered an air-raid alert in the centre and north of the country, NATO jets took off and Kaunas airport shut for a while. Kyiv later apologised, saying one of its drones may have been pushed off course by Russian jamming.
