Ukraine has accused Moscow of making “hollow statements about peace” after 88 people were injured in a Russian missile attack as US and Russian officials began talks that Washington hopes will mark the first step toward lasting peace.
Seventeen children were among the casualties after the missile hit schools and residential buildings in the city of Sumy, Ukrainian officials said late on Monday, as Moscow appeared to be exploiting the window before any ceasefire to launch attacks on Ukraine.
“Every day like this, all the nights with Russian missiles and drones against our country, every day of the war means losses, pain and destruction that Ukraine never wanted,” Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said in his nightly video address.
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, said: “Instead of making hollow statements about peace, Russia must stop bombing our cities and end its war on civilians.”
Shortly after Zelenskyy’s comments, Russian media reported that US and Russian officials had ended 12 hours of talks in Saudi Arabia as Donald Trump pushes to broker a limited ceasefire.
Russian media reported that a draft joint statement had been sent to Moscow and Washington for approval, with the parties aiming to release it on Tuesday.
Ukraine and Russia have agreed in principle to a one-month halt on strikes on energy infrastructure after Trump spoke with the countries’ leaders last week. But uncertainty remains over how and when the partial ceasefire would take effect – and whether its scope would extend beyond energy infrastructure to include other critical sites, such as hospitals, bridges and vital utilities.
US officials held initial talks with Ukraine on Sunday evening and negotiated separately with Russia on Monday, with most meetings taking place at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh.
The US is expected to shuttle between the two countries to finalise details and negotiate separate measures to ensure the safety of shipping in the Black Sea. “The ultimate goal is a 30-day ceasefire, during which time we discuss a permanent ceasefire. We’re not far away from that,” said the US special envoy Steve Witkoff in a podcast with the far-right commentator Tucker Carlson over the weekend.
As the Russia-US talks began in Riyadh, Trump said he expected Washington and Kyiv to sign a revenue-sharing agreement on Ukrainian critical minerals soon.
Trump also told reporters the US was talking to Ukraine about the potential for its firms to own Ukrainian power plants.
Speaking to reporters in Washington, Trump listed issues he said were on the table: “We’re talking about territory right now. We’re talking about lines of demarcation, talking about power, power-plant ownership.”
Ukrainian officials have backed the signing of a minerals deal, but Zelenskyy has publicly rejected the idea of US firms owning Ukrainian power plants.
The lead-up to the talks was marked by a series of pro-Russian statements by Witkoff – tapped by Trump as his personal envoy to Putin – in which he appeared to legitimise Russia’s staged referendums in four Ukrainian regions.
Speaking with Carlson, Witkoff claimed that in the four regions where Moscow held widely condemned referendums on joining Russia, “the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule”.
The referendums in Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces were widely rebuked in the west as illegitimate and are viewed as a thinly veiled attempt to justify Russia’s illegal annexation of the regions. Their annexation marked the largest forcible seizure of territory in Europe since the second world war.
In the interview with Carlson, Witkoff also claimed Putin had commissioned a portrait of Trump “by a leading Russian painter” that the envoy had brought back with him after a trip to Moscow.
Witkoff went on to say that after the assassination attempt on Trump last July, Putin told him that he visited his local church, met his priest and prayed for Trump. “Not because he was the president of the United States or could become the president of the United States, but because he had a friendship with him and he was praying for his friend,” Witkoff said.
“I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy. That is a complicated situation, that war and all the ingredients that led up to it,” he added.
Witkoff’s willingness to echo Kremlin talking points and his praise for Putin are likely to heighten anxiety in Ukraine and across European capitals.
In an interview with Time magazine published on Monday but conducted before Witkoff’s remarks, Zelenskyy said some US officials had begun to take Putin at his word even when it contradicted their own intelligence.
“I believe Russia has managed to influence some people on the White House team through information,” he said. “Their signal to the Americans was that the Ukrainians do not want to end the war, and something should be done to force them.”
Moscow and Kyiv remain far apart on what would be acceptable terms for a peace treaty, with no sign that Putin has relinquished any of his maximalist aims in the war against Ukraine.
Moscow has set out several maximalist conditions for any long-term settlement – most of which are non-starters for Kyiv and its European allies. These include a halt to all foreign military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine, restrictions on the size of its armed forces, and international recognition of the four Ukrainian regions Russia illegally annexed following staged referendums in 2022.
The Kremlin has also signalled it would reject any presence of western troops in Ukraine – something Kyiv views as essential to securing lasting security guarantees.
Ukraine remains deeply sceptical of any Russian agreement, pointing to past instances where Moscow failed to honour its commitments.
