(AFP) – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday that Moscow was expressing its “thanks” for a diesel deal agreed with the United States by attacking Ukraine, as fresh Russian strikes killed 16 people, authorities said. The deal, which US President Donald Trump announced on Friday after a call with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, would see Moscow release large amounts of diesel onto global markets in exchange for sanctions relief.
Zelensky told reporters on Friday that the deal was “unworthy of our partners” and described it as a “weak decision”. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said on Saturday that lifting sanctions on Russian diesel would help fuel the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine. “This is not the time to ease pressure on Russia, and Europe won’t,” she wrote online. Germany also said it would continue to push for new EU sanctions on Russia, despite the agreement.
Moscow has intensified its deadly bombardment of Ukraine in recent months, sending civilian casualties soaring, while US-led efforts to broker an end to the more than four-and-a-half year conflict remain deadlocked. Early Saturday, a Russian glide bomb attack on the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia killed 15 people, including three children, according to Ukrainian authorities.
“Today, Russia expressed its thanks for the lifting of sanctions on diesel exports by dropping five glide bombs on residential buildings in Zaporizhzhia,” Zelensky said in a post on X. An AFP correspondent at the scene saw rescuers pulling people from the rubble. “We saw people under the rubble — a woman, her husband and a child,” one rescuer, Daniil Pishkin, told AFP. He added that he saw two people rescued from the wreckage but “unfortunately there was a little girl who died”.
A resident of one of the buildings that was hit, who identified herself as Iryna, 69, said she just had time to seek refuge in the toilets after receiving an air raid warning. Her two neighbours were killed, she said. “They were 75 years old. They were simply thrown out there, onto the street. They didn’t make it to the hospital,” she told AFP. A Russian drone attack on Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region killed an 11-year-old boy, the region’s governor said. Russian strikes meanwhile triggered large-scale power outages in the capital Kyiv, Ukraine’s DTEK energy provider said, as the city’s mayor reported a strike on a restaurant in the capital. AFP reporters heard booms over Kyiv earlier in the day. The Russian defence ministry said it had hit a “data centre” in the city used by Ukraine’s military.
The strikes came as Ukraine expressed mounting frustration at Washington’s diesel agreement with Russia. Prices at US gasoline and diesel pumps have surged since late February, when the United States and Israel launched joint military strikes on Iran. Announcing the deal on Friday, Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform that diesel prices would be “coming down, in record numbers, and fast”, in all caps. “I want to thank President Putin, to be honest with you,” he later told reporters. In a post on Facebook on Saturday, Zelensky said the deal needed to be reversed.
“Russia’s choice is war. And they will be ready to end it only when they feel that their ability to drag the war out is diminishing,” Zelensky said. “Unfortunately, the signals Russia received yesterday were entirely different — signals suggesting that it could simply keep attacking. This needs to be corrected.”
US, Ukrainian and European officials met in Miami on Friday in a renewed diplomatic push to end the war. Ukraine’s delegation was headed home on Saturday, an aide to Zelensky said. Trump, who has repeatedly touted his credentials as a peacemaker, has long sought to broker a deal since taking office last January. US envoy Steve Witkoff posted to X after the meeting that the “constructive discussions” tackled “potential avenues to de-escalate and conclude the war with Russia ahead of winter and advance efforts toward a durable and lasting peace”. Witkoff said the meeting included “the E3, the European Commission, Ukraine and NATO”.
The Kremlin said Saturday that Trump had conveyed his ideas about how to de-escalate the war to Putin during a phone call on Friday. Putin received the proposals “with understanding”, the Kremlin said, without elaborating on what the proposals were or the Russian president’s response. Russia, which launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, now occupies roughly one-fifth of Ukrainian territory.
– Victoria LUKOVENKO in Kyiv, with Daria NAZAROVA in Zaporizhzhia.
© 2024 AFP
