Russian forces targeted Ukraine’s energy and gas infrastructure in their latest drone and missile attack, Ukraine’s energy minister said on Friday.
Regional officials from the northeastern city of Kharkiv to the western city of Ternopil reported damage to energy and other infrastructure. Eight people were injured in Kharkiv and two more, including a child, were hurt in Poltava, officials said.
“Russia continues its energy terror,” Energy Minister German Galuschenko said on Facebook. “Again energy and gas infrastructure in various regions of Ukraine has come under massive missile and drone fire.”
“Wherever possible, rescuers and power engineers are working to eliminate the consequences. All necessary measures are being taken to stabilize power and gas supplies,” he added.
Ukraine’s air force said Russia had fired a salvo of 67 missiles and 194 drones in the overnight attack, adding that it had shot down 34 of the missiles and 100 of the drones.
For the first time, Ukraine deployed French Mirage-2000 warplanes delivered a month ago to help repel the attack, according to the air force. Ukraine also has Western-supplied F-16 fighter jets to shoot down Russian missiles.
The attack on Friday was the first large-scale assault from Russia since the suspension of the U.S. military aid and intelligence in recent days from President Donald Trump’s administration, which has halted military aid to Ukraine as well as intelligence sharing, in a reversal of U.S. policies under predecessor Joe Biden.
When asked in the Oval Office if he thought Russian President Vladimir Putin is taking advantage of the pause in intelligence, Trump replied, “I think actually he’s doing what anybody else would do.”
“I think he wants to get it stopped and settled, and I think he’s hitting them harder than he’s been hitting them. And I think probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now.”
First attack since U.S. pullback announced
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for a truce in the air and at sea, as well as additional pressure on Russia.
“The first steps to establishing real peace should be forcing the sole source of this war, Russia, to stop such attacks,” Zelenskyy said on the Telegram app.
Russia, which previously focused its missile and drone attacks on the Ukrainian electricity sector, has in recent months sharply stepped up its attacks on Ukrainian gas storage facilities and production fields.
The Russian Defence Ministry said on Friday its forces carried out strikes with long-range air, sea and land-based precision weapons against what it called gas and energy infrastructure supporting Ukraine’s military-industrial complex.
Trump and his Vice-President JD Vance accused Zelenskyy of not being grateful enough for American support in a remarkable display recorded in the Oval Office exactly one week ago, though there have been modest signs of re-engagement between the U.S. and Ukraine this week.
Zelenskyy said late Thursday he would travel to Saudi Arabia next Monday for a meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman ahead of talks there later in the week between U.S. and Ukrainian officials.
“Ukraine is ready to pursue the path to peace, and it is Ukraine that strives for peace from the very first second of this war. The task is to force Russia to stop the war,” Zelenskyy said in his Telegram message on Friday.
Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, who has already held extensive talks with Russian officials, said he was in discussions with Ukraine for a peace agreement framework and confirmed that a meeting was planned next week with the Ukrainians in Saudi Arabia.
Ukraine inroads in Kursk threatened
On the battlefield, a Russian Defence Ministry statement on Thursday said its forces had captured the village of Andriivka — west of the logistics centre of Kurakhove, which Moscow said it had taken in early January.
The General Staff of Ukraine’s military made no mention of Andriivka falling into Russian hands. But in a late evening report, it mentioned the settlement as one of five that had come under attack during 17 attempts by Russian forces to pierce Ukrainian defences in the Pokrovsk sector in Donetsk region.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s situation in Kursk has deteriorated sharply in the last three days, open source maps show, after Russian forces retook territory as part of a gathering counteroffensive that has nearly cut the Ukrainian force in two and separated the main group from its principal supply lines.
Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk last August was the most serious attack on Russian territory since the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and was designed to bring the war to ordinary Russians, whom the Kremlin had tried to shield from the fallout from the fighting raging inside Ukraine.
“The situation is very bad,” Pasi Paroinen, a military analyst with the Finland-based Black Bird Group, which analyzes satellite data, told Reuters.
“Now there is not much left until Ukrainian forces will either be encircled or forced to withdraw. And withdrawal would mean running a dangerous gauntlet, where the forces would be constantly threatened by Russian drones and artillery,” he said.
Open source mapping from Deep State, an authoritative Ukrainian military blogging resource, showed on Friday that around three-quarters of the Ukrainian force inside Russia had now been almost completely encircled.
There was no official confirmation of the Russian thrust from the Russian Defence Ministry or the Ukrainian military, both of which tend to report battlefield changes with a delay.
Orban a holdout on EU pledge
European leaders on Thursday backed plans to spend more on defence and continue to stand by Ukraine in a world upended by change in American support. But the statement of support came from 26 European Union countries, not all 27.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban refused to endorse the statement and said Friday the EU couldn’t afford such as a commitment. Orban said the way the EU wants to support Ukraine now, while also boosting Europe’s own defence spending, would “ruin Europe.”
The European Union is considering a more than $1-trillion aid plan for Ukraine and ramping-up defence spending after Donald Trump’s suspension of military aid to Kyiv fueled concerns the EU can no longer rely on U.S. protection from Russian aggression.
“Today it appears that I have vetoed. But within weeks they will come back and it will turn out that there is no money for these goals,” he said in a state radio address.
Orban has refused to send weapons to Ukraine since the start of the war in 2022, and keeps close relations with both Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
