Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky called on Wednesday for an ‘immediate, full, and unconditional ceasefire’, hours after a Russian drone strike on a bus killed nine and as his top aide met Kyiv’s allies in London.
Images published by Dnipropetrovsk governor Sergiy Lysak showed a bus with a hole punctured through its ceiling and what appeared to be blood and shattered glass scattered across its floors.
Zelensky called it an ‘egregiously brutal attack and an absolutely deliberate war crime’.
‘In Ukraine, we insist on an immediate, full, and unconditional ceasefire,’ he said on social media, adding that ‘stopping the killings is the number one task’.
Lysak said nine people had been killed and 49 wounded in the attack on the southern town of Marganets.
Zelensky also repeated his call for a partial halt on some missile and drone attacks.
‘We are also ready for an immediate ceasefire at least for civilian targets,’ he said.
Russian president Vladimir Putin announced a surprise Easter truce over the weekend.
It saw fighting dip and air attacks practically halt for 30 hours.
But Ukraine and its allies dismissed it as a PR exercise from the Kremlin leader, saying Putin had no interest in real peace talks.
Russia launched more than 100 drones at Ukraine between Tuesday evening and early Wednesday, the Ukrainian air force said.
Ukrainian authorities also reported fires in several regions overnight after Russian attacks.
Strikes were reported in the regions of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Poltava and Odesa.
In Russia, one person was reported wounded by Ukrainian shelling in the Belgorod region, the local governor said.
Zelensky’s chief of staff, defence and foreign ministers were in London Wednesday for talks with Kyiv’s allies — downgraded at the last minute after US secretary of state Marco Rubio cancelled plans to attend.
Meanwhile, envoys from Washington, Kyiv and European nations gathered for talks in Britain on Wednesday amid a new US push to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, but a planned meeting of foreign ministers was postponed.
The London meeting comes as US media reported that president Donald Trump is ready to accept recognition of annexed land in Crimea as Russian territory.
The reports said the proposal was first raised at a similar meeting with European nations in Paris last week. Trump has since threatened to ‘take a pass’ on efforts to end the conflict unless progress is made quickly.
US presidential envoy Steve Witkoff is to visit Moscow this week, the White House has confirmed, in what would be his fourth trip to Russia since Trump took office.
According to The Financial Times, president Vladimir Putin told Witkoff he was prepared to halt the invasion and freeze the current front-line if Russia’s sovereignty over the Crimean Peninsula, annexed in 2014, was recognised.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded by saying that ‘a lot of fakes are being published at the moment’, according to the RIA Novosti state news agency.
Secretary of state Marco Rubio said he had presented a US plan to end the war but no details were given. Rubio also discussed the plan with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, during a telephone conversation after the Paris meeting.
Rubio and Trump have warned since the Paris talks that the United States could walk away from peace talks unless it saw quick progress.
Trump ‘wants to see this war end and he has grown frustrated with both sides of this war, and he’s made that very known’, his spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday.
Rubio had said in Paris last week he would go to London if he thought his attendance could be useful.
