Trump says Putin will halt Kyiv bombing during looming cold snap

Kyiv: US President Donald Trump said he had asked Russian President Vladimir Putin not to target the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv for one week as the region experiences frigid temperatures and that Putin had agreed, but there was no confirmation of that from Moscow.

The call for a pause in attacks on Ukraine’s capital comes as Russia has been pounding the country’s critical infrastructure, leaving many around the country without heat in the dead of winter.

“I personally asked President Putin not to fire on Kyiv and the cities and towns for a week during this … extraordinary cold,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Thursday (Washington time), adding that Putin has “agreed to that”.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was asked earlier on Thursday whether a mutual halt on strikes on energy facilities was being discussed between Russia and Ukraine, and he refused to comment on the issue.

Reports of a possible partial ceasefire surfaced earlier on Thursday through bloggers close to the Russian military, London’s Telegraph reported.

“We are receiving reports that…the Russian Armed Forces have imposed a ban on the use of fire… on any infrastructure facilities throughout Ukraine,” prominent Russian blogger Vladimir Romanov said. He added that a similar ban applies to “any facilities in Kyiv and the Kyiv region”.

Ukrainian social media channels with connections to the military also reported there had been orders not to strike Russian energy infrastructure facilities, the Telegraph reported.

Trump said that he was pleased that Putin has agreed to the pause. Kyiv is forecast to enter a brutally cold stretch starting on Friday that is expected to last into next week.

“A lot of people said, ‘Don’t waste the call. You’re not going to get that’,” Trump said of his request of Putin. “And he did it. And we’re very happy that they did it.”

Kyiv has grappled with severe power shortages this winter.

Russia has sought to deny Ukrainian civilians heat and running water over the course of the war, hoping to wear down public resistance to Moscow’s full-scale invasion, which began in February 2022. Ukrainian officials describe the strategy as “weaponising winter”.

Last year was also the deadliest for civilians in Ukraine since 2022 as Russia intensified its aerial barrages behind the front line, according to the U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in the country. The war killed 2514 civilians and injured 12,142 in Ukraine – 31 per cent higher than in 2024, it said.

Meanwhile, a Russian drone attack killed three people in the southern Zaporizhzhia region overnight on Wednesday (Ukraine time), authorities said, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that Moscow was planning another large-scale barrage despite plans for further US-brokered peace talks at the weekend.

Zelensky said Ukrainian intelligence reports indicated Russia was assembling forces for a major aerial attack. Previous large attacks, sometimes involving more than 800 drones as well as cruise and ballistic missiles, have targeted the Ukrainian power grid.

The ongoing attacks discredit the peace talks, Zelensky said. “Every single Russian strike does,” he said late on Wednesday.

Russia’s daily bombardment of civilian areas behind the roughly 1000-kilometer front line has continued despite international condemnation and attempts to end the fighting almost four years after Russia launched its devastating all-out invasion of Ukraine.

Ukraine is working with SpaceX to address the reported use of its Starlink satellite service by Russian attack drones, Ukrainian Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said on Thursday on the Telegram messaging app.

He said that his team contacted the American aerospace company run by Elon Musk and “proposed ways to resolve the issue”. Starlink is a global internet network that relies on about 10,000 satellites orbiting Earth.

Fedorov thanked Musk and SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell for their “swift response and the start of work on resolving the situation”.

Russia launched more than 6000 drones at Ukraine over the past month alone, according to Fedorov.

The Russian drone attacks on Ukraine’s electricity network are denying people heating, light and running water during the coldest winter in years, and the hardship is set to get worse.

Severe frost is expected to hit Ukraine in early February, with temperatures in some areas dropping to minus 30 degrees, the State Emergency Service warned.

Negotiations between the two sides are poised to resume on Sunday amid doubts about Moscow’s commitment to a settlement.

The European Union’s top diplomat on Thursday (Brussels time) accused Russia of not taking the talks seriously, calling for more pressure to be exerted on Moscow to press it into making concessions.

“We see them increasing their attacks on Ukraine because they can’t make moves on the battlefield. So, they are attacking civilians,” Kaja Kallas said of Russia at a meeting of EU foreign ministers.

She stressed that Europe, which sees its own future security at stake in Ukraine, must be fully involved in talks to end the war. The push for a settlement has been led over the past year by the Trump administration, and European leaders fear their concerns may not be taken into account.

The number of soldiers killed, injured or missing on both sides during the war could reach 2 million by spring, with Russia sustaining the largest number of troop deaths for any major power in any conflict since World War II, according to an international think tank report published this week.

AP

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.