Russia Pounds Kyiv in Rare Daytime Drone Barrage, Kills Six, Hours After Trump-Zelensky Talks
A wave of fast, high-flying drones struck the Ukrainian capital for hours as officials in Donetsk reported a separate deadly strike — just a day after Trump and Zelensky discussed a possible energy ceasefire.

Russia unleashed a rare daytime drone assault on Kyiv Wednesday, killing two people and injuring more than 30 others in an attack that stretched for hours from morning into early afternoon — just a day after President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky discussed a possible ceasefire on energy targets at the United Nations.
The strikes used faster, high-flying jet drones that are harder for Ukrainian air defenses to intercept than the propeller-driven models Russia has relied on for much of the war, according to Al Jazeera. A separate Russian aerial bomb attack hit a village in the front-line Donetsk region the same day, killing at least four more people and injuring four others, the regional governor said.
Talks Continue Even as Bombs Fall
The attacks came less than 24 hours after Zelensky met Trump on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly to discuss a potential bilateral ceasefire limited to energy infrastructure. Zelensky said afterward that no agreement had been reached but that he was ready for "any format" of an energy truce — as long as Russia stopped striking Ukraine's power grid and fuel facilities, according to CBC News.
READY FOR ANY FORMAT OF AN ENERGY CEASEFIRE — AS LONG AS RUSSIA STOPS ITS ATTACKS ON UKRAINIAN INFRASTRUCTURE.
The renewed strikes also come days after Trump pressed Zelensky in a phone call to halt Ukraine's own long-range strikes on Russian oil refineries, citing concern that the attacks were worsening a global diesel shortage and pushing up fuel prices worldwide — reporting that Ukrainian officials later said got ahead of where the actual talks stood, according to PBS NewsHour.
No Truce in Sight
Ukraine's air force said its defenses shot down dozens of the incoming drones overnight and into Wednesday, but enough got through to snarl rail and power infrastructure in the capital and beyond. For residents, the daytime timing of the assault was itself unusual and unsettling — most major strikes on Kyiv have come under cover of darkness.
With both sides continuing to trade strikes even as their leaders talk peace, diplomats involved in the UN sidelines meetings cautioned that any energy-specific truce remains, for now, an aspiration rather than an agreement.
Wednesday's barrage is the latest in a monthslong pattern in which both militaries have targeted the other's energy infrastructure — Ukraine hitting Russian refineries to choke off fuel supplies feeding the war effort, and Russia hitting Ukrainian power and rail infrastructure as winter approaches. Ukrainian officials have warned that repeated strikes on the power grid threaten to leave millions of residents facing outages as temperatures drop in the coming months.
Trump, for his part, has pushed both sides toward some kind of narrower truce even as a full peace deal remains elusive, arguing that reining in refinery strikes specifically would help stabilize global fuel markets rattled by the broader war and by tensions in the Middle East.