KYIV – Russia resumed strikes on Ukraine as a three-day truce expired on May 12, attacking the capital with drones and killing one person in the eastern region of Dnipropetrovsk, the Ukrainian authorities said.
The Russian military, meanwhile, said it had shot down 27 Ukrainian drones after the ceasefire expired.
US President Donald Trump had announced the truce on May 8, hours before Russia’s World War II victory celebrations, saying he hoped it would mark “the beginning of the end” of the four-year-old conflict.
But even before it expired, the two countries had traded accusations of attacks on civilians that violated the truce.
As the ceasefire ended on May 12, Kyiv came under drone attacks, according to the Ukrainian authorities.
“Enemy UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) are currently over Kyiv. Please stay safe until the alert is cleared,” the head of the capital’s military administration, Mr Tymur Tkachenko, posted on messaging platform Telegram.
The alert siren was the first confirmed in the capital since May 8, before the ceasefire came into force.
Kyiv’s regional military administration told residents to remain in shelters and said its air defences could be operating in the area.
Russian strikes in eastern Ukraine killed one person and wounded at least four others, the regional military authorities said.
The strikes killed a man and wounded a woman in the area of Synelnykove in the Dnipropetrovsk region, the head of the regional military administration Oleksandr Ganzha posted on Telegram.
He added that three others were wounded in strikes elsewhere in Dnipropetrovsk.
On the Russian side, “air defence duty assets intercepted and destroyed 27 Ukrainian fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles” over the Belgorod, Voronezh and Rostov regions from midnight to 7am Moscow time, Russia’s Defence Ministry said in a statement.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had said on May 11 that fighting with Russia was ongoing despite the truce, accusing Moscow of not wanting to end the war started by President Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
“Today, there was no silence at the front, there was fighting. We have recorded all of this,” Mr Zelensky said in his daily address in the final hours of the truce.
Mr Zelensky also said it was “clear that the war in Iran is now drawing the most attention from America”.
Negotiations on the Russia-Ukraine war have so far led nowhere, and have been largely sidelined by the Iran conflict, though Mr Trump’s ceasefire announcement had raised some hope that US-led talks to end Russia’s invasion could be resumed. AFP
