Russia halts strikes on Ukraine’s Kiev at Trump’s request

Russia has agreed to a request from US President Donald Trump to halt air strikes on Kiev until February 1 amid harsh winter temperatures, and Ukraine said it was ready to reciprocate as Washington pushes for a diplomatic solution to end the war.

But as the Ukrainian capital braces for another bitterly cold spell from Sunday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Friday there was no formal truce between the two countries. He added that Russia had shifted to hitting Ukrainian logistics.

Russia has bombed Ukraine’s roads and railways in recent days.

The Kremlin said President Vladimir Putin had accepted Trump’s request to stop bombarding Kiev to create “favourable conditions” for peace talks. In recent weeks, Russian strikes on energy infrastructure in Kiev have left hundreds of thousands of people without heating in their homes for days on end at times as temperatures have dipped below minus 15 degrees Celsius.

“President Trump did indeed make a personal request to President Putin to refrain from striking Kiev for a week until February 1 in order to create favourable conditions for negotiations,” said Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, confirming that Putin had agreed.

Zelenskyy said Ukraine was ready to reciprocate, halting its attacks on Russian refinery infrastructure, saying this was “an opportunity rather than an agreement.”

In a post on the Telegram app, Zelenskyy said there were no strikes on Ukrainian energy facilities overnight, and that Moscow’s focus had shifted towards strikes on logistics infrastructure.

Referring to heavy Russian air strikes on Kiev that knocked out power to swathes of the city this month, Zelenskyy said Ukrainian air defences had been depleted because Kiev’s European allies had delayed payments to the US under the PURL weapons purchase programme. As a result, he said, US Patriot air defence missiles had not arrived on time.

“I know that (Russian) ballistic missiles are incoming against our energy infrastructure…and I know that there will be no electricity, because there are no missiles to intercept them,” Zelenskyy said, describing his predicament at that time.