US president condemns Russian attacks on Kyiv as Ukraine’s Zelenskyy calls for ‘regime change’ in Moscow.
United States President Donald Trump has threatened new sanctions while slamming Russia’s military actions in Ukraine as “disgusting”.
“Russia – I think it’s disgusting what they’re doing. I think it’s disgusting,” Trump told reporters on Thursday, the same day Moscow’s attacks on Kyiv killed more than a dozen people.
Trump also said he would send his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, currently in Israel, to visit Russia next.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has already met Witkoff multiple times in Moscow, before Trump’s efforts to mend ties with the Kremlin came to a grinding halt.
Washington has given Moscow until the end of next week to cease hostilities in Ukraine, under threat of severe economic sanctions.
Trump reiterated the deadline on Thursday.
“We’re going to put sanctions. I don’t know that sanctions bother him,” the US president said, referring to Putin.
Trump has previously threatened that new measures could mean “secondary tariffs” targeting Russia’s remaining trade partners, such as China and India. This would further stifle Russia, but would risk significant international disruption.
The US president began his second term with his own rosy predictions that the war in Ukraine, raging since Russia invaded its neighbour in February 2022, would soon end.
In recent weeks, Trump has increasingly voiced frustration with Putin over Moscow’s unrelenting offensive.
Call for ‘regime change’
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged his allies to bring about “regime change” in Russia, hours after the deadly attack on Kyiv.
Speaking virtually to a conference marking 50 years since the signing of the Cold War-era Helsinki Accords on Thursday, Zelenskyy said he believed Russia could be “pushed” to stop the war.
“But if the world doesn’t aim to change the regime in Russia, that means even after the war ends, Moscow will still try to destabilise neighbouring countries,” he said.
Russia’s predawn attacks on Kyiv on Thursday killed 26 people, including three children, and wounded 159, Ukraine’s interior ministry said on Friday.
On Thursday, officials said the drone and missile strikes had killed at least 18 people, and reduced part of a nine-storey apartment block in Kyiv’s western suburbs to rubble.
Among the victims was a six-year-old boy who died on the way to hospital, the head of the city’s military administration, Tymur Tkachenko, posted on Telegram.
From late Wednesday to early Thursday, Russia fired at least 300 drones and eight cruise missiles at Ukraine, with Kyiv the main target, the Ukrainian air force said.
Zelenskyy late on Thursday denounced the “unimaginable scale of terror and brutality” of the Russian strikes.
The Russian army, meanwhile, claimed to have captured Chasiv Yar, a strategically important hillside town in eastern Ukraine where the two sides have been fiercely fighting for months.
Moscow has stepped up its deadly aerial assaults on Ukraine in recent months in the conflict, resisting US pressure to end its nearly three-and-a-half-year invasion as its forces grind forward on the battlefield.
