Aamer Madhani and Susie Blann
Updated ,first published
Kyiv: US President Donald Trump said Russian President Vladimir Putin has agreed not to target the Ukrainian capital and other towns for one week as the region experiences frigid temperatures.
There was no immediate confirmation from the Kremlin that Putin had agreed to such a pause.
Russia has been pounding Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, hoping to wear down public resistance to the war while leaving many around the country to endure the dead of winter without heat.
“I personally asked President Putin not to fire on Kyiv and the cities and towns for a week during this … extraordinary cold,” Trump said during a cabinet meeting at the White House on Thursday (Washington time), adding that Putin has “agreed to that”.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was asked earlier on Thursday whether a mutual halt on strikes on energy facilities was being discussed between Russia and Ukraine, and he refused to comment on the issue.
Reports of a possible partial ceasefire surfaced earlier on Thursday through bloggers close to the Russian military, London’s Telegraph reported.
“We are receiving reports that … the Russian Armed Forces have imposed a ban on the use of fire … on any infrastructure facilities throughout Ukraine,” prominent Russian blogger Vladimir Romanov said. He added that a similar ban applies to “any facilities in Kyiv and the Kyiv region”.
Ukrainian social media channels with connections to the military also reported there had been orders not to strike Russian energy infrastructure facilities, the Telegraph reported.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned late on Wednesday that Moscow was planning another large-scale barrage despite plans for further US-brokered peace talks this weekend.
Trump said he was pleased that Putin had agreed to the pause. Kyiv, which has grappled with severe power shortages this winter, is forecast to enter a brutally cold stretch starting on Friday that is expected to last into next week.
Temperatures in some areas will drop to minus 30 degrees, the State Emergency Service warned.
“A lot of people said, ‘Don’t waste the call. You’re not going to get that’,” Trump said of his request to Putin. “And he did it. And we’re very happy that they did it.”
Zelensky thanked Trump for his effort and welcomed the “possibility” of a pause in Russian military action on Kyiv and beyond. “Power supply is a foundation of life,” he said in a social media post.
“We expect the agreements to be implemented. De-escalation steps contribute to real progress toward ending the war.”
Trump did not say when the call with Putin took place or when the ceasefire would go into effect. The White House did not immediately respond to a query seeking clarity about the scope and timing of the limited pause in the nearly four-year war.
Russia has sought to deny Ukrainian civilians heat and running water over the course of the war, hoping to wear down public resistance to Moscow’s full-scale invasion, which began in February 2022. Ukrainian officials describe the strategy as “weaponising winter”.
Last year was also the deadliest for civilians in Ukraine since 2022 as Russia intensified its aerial barrages behind the front line, according to the U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in the country. The war killed 2514 civilians and injured 12,142 in Ukraine – 31 per cent higher than in 2024, it said.
A Russian drone attack killed three people in Ukraine’s southern Zaporizhzhia region overnight and caused a major blaze in an apartment building, officials said on Thursday. Firefighters also worked through the night to put out fires in the central Dnipropetrovsk region, where two people were injured, officials said.
Zelensky said Ukrainian intelligence reports indicated Russia was assembling forces for a major aerial attack. Previous large attacks, sometimes involving more than 800 drones as well as cruise and ballistic missiles, have targeted the Ukrainian power grid.
The ongoing attacks discredit the peace talks, Zelensky said. “Every single Russian strike does,” he said late on Wednesday.
Russia’s daily bombardment of civilian areas behind the roughly 1000-kilometre front line has continued despite international condemnation and attempts to end the fighting.
Ukraine is working with SpaceX to address the reported use of its Starlink satellite internet service by Russian attack drones, Ukrainian Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said on Thursday on the Telegram messaging app.
He said that his team contacted the American aerospace company run by Elon Musk and “proposed ways to resolve the issue”.
Fedorov thanked Musk and SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell for their “swift response and the start of work on resolving the situation”.
Russia launched more than 6000 drones at Ukraine over the past month alone, according to Fedorov.
Negotiations between the two sides are poised to resume on Sunday amid doubts about Moscow’s commitment to a settlement.
The European Union’s top diplomat on Thursday (Brussels time) accused Russia of not taking the talks seriously, calling for more pressure to be exerted on Moscow to press it into making concessions.
“We see them increasing their attacks on Ukraine because they can’t make moves on the battlefield. So, they are attacking civilians,” Kaja Kallas said of Russia at a meeting of EU foreign ministers.
She stressed that Europe, which sees its own future security at stake in Ukraine, must be fully involved in talks to end the war. The push for a settlement has been led over the past year by the Trump administration, and European leaders fear their concerns may not be taken into account.
Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, said on Thursday that “a lot of progress” was made in recent three-way talks and expressed optimism that more headway can be made when the parties meet again in the coming days.
“I think the people of Ukraine are now hopeful and expecting that we are going to deliver a peace deal sometime soon,” Witkoff added.
The number of soldiers killed, injured or missing on both sides during the war could reach 2 million by spring, with Russia sustaining the largest number of troop deaths for any major power in any conflict since World War II, according to an international think tank report published this week.
AP
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