Russia’s defence ministry claimed on Thursday to have carried out successful strikes against missile plants, weapons design bureaus and rocket fuel producers in Ukraine.
Highlighting attacks that took place in July, the ministry said Russian forces had destroyed some Western missile defence systems, including Patriot launchers and fire control radar in the Dnipropetrovsk and Sumy regions, which had been deployed to defend the plants.
“An attempt by the Kyiv regime, together with its Western partners, to organise the production of missiles to carry out attacks deep into the territory of the Russian Federation was thwarted,” the ministry said.
Ukraine and Russia fired drones and missiles into each other’s territory overnight into Thursday, continuing cross-border attacks.
Drone strikes by Ukraine wounded at least three people and sparked fires in two southern Russian regions, including at an oil refinery, officials said.
“The debris from the attack caused oil products to spill and catch fire at the Volgograd oil refinery,” Andrei Bocharov, the governor of the Volgograd region, said in a statement on Telegram.
The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said a Ukrainian drone had struck a car in the centre of the region’s capital, setting it alight and wounding three people.
Trump warned of “severe consequences” for Russia if Putin rejects a ceasefire in Ukraine.
He said he had already tried to dissuade the Russian president from firing missiles and drones at Ukrainian cities while the ceasefire talks were in progress.
“I’ve had a lot of good conversations with him,” he said. “Then I go home and I see that a rocket hit a nursing home, or a rocket hit an apartment building, and people are laying dead … So I guess the answer to that is no, because I’ve had this conversation.”
President Trump has suggested he will hold a meeting with President Putin and President Zelensky “almost immediately” after his summit with the Russian leader in Alaska on Friday.
Trump floated the possibility of the three-way meeting during an event at the Kennedy Center in Washington on Wednesday.
“There’s a very good chance we will have a second meeting that will be more productive than the first,” he said. “If the first one goes OK, we will have a quick second one. I would like to do it almost immediately, and we’ll have a quick second meeting between President Putin and President Zelensky and myself if they’d like to have me there.”
Sir Keir Starmer is due to welcome President Zelensky to Downing Street in a show of support for the Ukrainian leader.
On Wednesday the prime minister said there was a “viable” chance for a ceasefire, after a call with President Trump, Zelensky and other European leaders.
Speaking to the “coalition of the willing”, he said: “As I’ve said personally to President Trump, for three and a bit years this conflict has been going on and we haven’t got anywhere near the prospect of actually a viable solution, a viable way, of bringing it to a ceasefire. And now we do have that chance because of the work that the president has put in.”