Kyiv:
Ukraine and Russia attacked each other with a barrage of drones on Saturday, with Moscow regaining more of its territory in the Kursk region, as international efforts to end the three-year war between the neighbours intensify.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he has “serious questions” over a US-proposed ceasefire in Ukraine while Donald Trump said Washington and Moscow have held “productive” talks on the idea.
Saturday saw British Prime Minister Keir Starmer say Putin would “sooner or later” have to “come to the table and engage in serious discussion.”
Talks hosted in a call set up by Downing Street aim to urge around 25 participating countries to sign up to a coalition willing to protect any eventual ceasefire in Ukraine.
Ukraine said it had downed 130 Iranian-made drones launched by Russia across the country, while Moscow said it shot down 126 drones over its southern and border regions.
Moscow has pushed this week to retake a large part of the land that Ukraine originally captured in its western Kursk region.
The Russian defence ministry said troops took control over the villages of Zaoleshenka and Rubanshchina — north and west of the town of Sudzha, the main town that Moscow reclaimed this week.
Putin on Friday called on embattled Ukrainian troops in the Kursk region to “surrender”, while his US counterpart Trump urged the Kremlin to spare their lives.
“If they lay down their arms and surrender, they will be guaranteed life and dignified treatment,” Putin said Friday.
Russia’s defence ministry also said that military engineers were working to clear the areas that were held by Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday that the situation in Kursk is “obviously very difficult.”
The Ukrainian army on Saturday published a map on social media that showed its troops had retreated west towards the border.
Russia Oil Depot Fire
Russia had also deployed almost 200 firefighters to help put out a fire at an oil depot caused by a Ukraine drone strike in the southern Krasnodar region, authorities said.
The governor of the Krasnodar region Veniamin Kondratyev said in the early hours of Saturday that a petrol reserve station in the Black Sea city of Tuapse was “attacked by the Kyiv regime.”
The government of the Krasnodar region said 188 people were involved in putting out the fire.
In Ukraine, officials said the number of wounded from a Russian strike a day earlier on President Volodymyr Zelensky’s hometown Kryvy Rig rose to 14.
On Friday, officials said Russia attacked a residential area of the central Ukrainian city – regularly targeted throughout Moscow’s more than three-year invasion.
“Fourteen people were wounded, among them two children,” the head of the Dnipropetrovsk region, Sergiy Lysak, said on Telegram.
Ukrainian prosecutors said the wounded children were a two-year-old and a 15-year-old.
Lysak said the missile attack destroyed over a dozen large apartment buildings and 10 private houses.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)