Putin Attacks Ukraine Just Hours After Trump Claimed He Had Promised Not To | EUROtoday

WASHINGTON – A mere hours after President Donald Trump claimed that Vladimir Putin had agreed to cease attacking Ukraine due to the chilly climate there, the Russian dictator rained down greater than 100 drones and a ballistic missile on the neighbor he’s nonetheless attempting to take by power.

A metropolis bus driver was killed and 5 civilians injured in Kherson on Friday, based on native media, whereas Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reported persevering with assaults towards residents elsewhere.

“Drone attacks on ordinary residential buildings in cities also continue. A ballistic missile was used against the Kharkiv region – civilian production warehouses were damaged, including those of an American company,” Zelenskyy wrote in a social media submit, apparently referring to a facility owned by tobacco big Philip Morris.

A complete of 111 long-range drones and one ballistic missile had been launched into Ukraine on Friday, based on the Institute for the Study of War, an unbiased group monitoring Russia’s assaults.

On Thursday afternoon, Trump had boasted how his private intervention was serving to Ukrainians as they struggled by means of a bitter chilly snap that was sending in a single day temperatures there under zero levels Fahrenheit.

“They said they’ve never experienced cold like that, and I personally asked President Putin not to fire into Kyiv and the various towns for a week and he agreed to do that. And I have to tell you, it was very nice. People said, ‘Don’t waste the call, you’re not going to get that,’” Trump stated. “And he did it and we’re very happy that they did it because on top of everything else that’s not what they need is missiles coming into their towns and cities.”

On Friday, neither on social media nor throughout a session with reporters within the Oval Office did he provide any rationalization for why Putin just isn’t honoring his purported promise.

Instead, Ukrainian and Russian officers supplied completely different accounts of what they agreed to at three-way talks in Abu Dhabi final weekend. Zelenskyy stated the settlement was concerning the two international locations not attacking one another’s vitality infrastructure. “Ukraine is ready to mirror the restraint, and today we did not attack Russian energy,” he wrote in a Friday afternoon submit.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov advised reporters that Putin had agreed to not strike Kyiv particularly, based on the Moscow Times.

“I can say that President Trump did indeed make a personal request to President Putin to refrain from striking Kyiv for a week, until Feb. 1, as a way to create more hospitable conditions for negotiations.”

“Shocked,” joked Robert Kagan, a Brookings Institution analyst and veteran of the Ronald Reagan State Department. A day earlier, after Trump introduced Putin’s purported settlement to not assault, Kagan had stated that it appeared that Putin was going out of his strategy to humiliate Trump.

The White House, on Friday, wouldn’t reply to questions on Putin’s persevering with assaults on Ukraine, however Trump’s claimed promise.

Spokeswoman Anna Kelly supplied solely the next: “As President Trump said, he asked President Putin to withhold strikes on Kyiv for one week amid extremely cold temperatures, and the Russian president agreed to do so. President Trump has done more than anyone to save lives and bring this brutal war to an end.”

Trump, after taking workplace, stopped sending U.S. navy support to Ukraine, as predecessor Joe Biden had been doing. Instead, Trump is demanding that America’s European allies buy weapons from the U.S. and, in the event that they so select, give them to Ukraine.

Trump has typically repeated Putin’s speaking factors concerning the historical past of Russia and Ukraine after talking or assembly with Putin and has even created an ethical equivalence between Russia’s ongoing homicide of Ukrainian civilians and Ukraine’s retaliatory strikes towards the Russian oil business.