FRIDAY April 18, 2025 |
By thenewsdesk.ng

Ukraine has reported dozens of civilian deaths from Russian attacks over the past week, including three killed in a late-night assault on Wednesday in the southeastern city of Dnipro, Al-jazeera reports.

A child was among the victims of the drone attack, which came hours before high-stakes meetings in Paris due to take place later on Thursday, during which United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff are to meet French President Emmanuel Macron and other European officials to discuss the conflict.

But as Moscow’s self-imposed 30-day ceasefire on energy infrastructure approached its close, talks to achieve a broader ceasefire so far have showed little sign of progress.

Russia has stuck to its hardline positions while accusing Ukraine of violating the energy ceasefire, to which Kyiv never agreed.

“This temporary moratorium has not been and is not being observed by the Ukrainian armed forces,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Tuesday.

Russia said Ukrainian drones targeted an electricity substation and a high-tension power line in the Bryansk region that day, an electricity substation in the occupied part of Kherson in Ukraine, and two low-pressure gas pipelines in Kursk.

Moscow’s forces claimed to have shot down seven UAVs near Shuya in the Ivanovo region on Wednesday, 260km (160 miles) east of Moscow and 500km (310 miles) from the Ukrainian border. In total, it said, 26 drones were downed over several regions of Russia.

Asked whether Russia would resume attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure on Friday, Peskov said, “Everything will depend on further orders from the supreme commander in chief,” a reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin’s March 18 energy ceasefire proposal was a counteroffer to US President Donald Trump’s March 10 total ceasefire proposal, which Ukraine had agreed to. The US thus ended up with two separate ceasefire agreements, one with Moscow and one with Kyiv, to which each warring capital held the other.

“Today marks exactly a month since the Russian Federation refused to accept a full and unconditional ceasefire proposed by the American side in the negotiations,” said Ukraine’s General Staff last week. During that time, it said, Russia carried out 5,124 ground assaults, more than 3,000 of them against Pokrovsk, Toretsk and Lyman, the three Russian priority targets in Ukraine’s Donetsk region.

“Since the beginning of April alone, the Russian army has already used almost 2,800 aerial bombs,” Zelenskyy wrote on Telegram.

The US has found itself not just between two failed ceasefires but denying that it had proposed an effective partition of Ukraine following a truce.

The Times, a British daily, reported that Washington’s special envoy to Ukraine Keith Kellogg proposed partitioning Ukraine into spheres of influence “almost like Berlin after World War Two”, with Russian and NATO troops controlling different zones.

Kellogg said The Times misrepresented his proposal, which was “referencing areas or zones of responsibility for an allied force”, not including US troops, “in support of Ukraine’s sovereignty”.

But speaking during a meeting of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in Almaty on Friday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said “a return to the 1991 borders, as Zelenskyy continues to demand, is impossible.”

Even Kellogg’s idea of a Berlin-style occupation by troops of different nationalities was a nonstarter for Russia, which has said it would never accept NATO troops on Ukrainian soil.

Russian Ambassador-at-Large Rodion Miroshnik told reporters on Saturday that maintaining military zones would later lead to “a new level of escalation”.

Given these divergences, Peskov said it is “hardly possible” to expect immediate results.