{"id":136175,"date":"2025-05-27T14:49:12","date_gmt":"2025-05-27T14:49:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/136175\/"},"modified":"2025-05-27T14:49:12","modified_gmt":"2025-05-27T14:49:12","slug":"drone-war-ground-offensive-continue-despite-new-russia-ukraine-peace-push-russia-ukraine-war-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/136175\/","title":{"rendered":"Drone war, ground offensive continue despite new Russia-Ukraine peace push | Russia-Ukraine war News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Russia and Ukraine<\/a> have launched a wave of drone attacks against each other overnight, even as Moscow claimed it was finalising a peace proposal to end the war.<\/p>\n

Ukrainian air force officials said on Tuesday that Russia deployed 60 drones across multiple regions through the night, injuring 10 people. Kyiv\u2019s air defences intercepted 43 of them \u2013 35 were shot down while eight were diverted using electronic warfare systems.<\/p>\n

In Dnipropetrovsk, central Ukraine, Governor Serhiy Lysak reported damage to residential properties and an agricultural site after Russian drones led to fires during the night. In Kherson, a southern city frequently hit by Russian strikes, a drone attack on Tuesday morning wounded a 59-year-old man and six municipal workers, officials said.<\/p>\n

The barrage came days after Ukraine endured one of the heaviest aerial offensives of the war. On Sunday night alone, Ukraine\u2019s air force claimed Russia launched 355 drones, a record number.<\/p>\n

That escalation prompted United States President Donald Trump to declare<\/a> that Vladimir Putin had \u201cgone absolutely CRAZY\u201d and to threaten new sanctions. The Kremlin brushed off the remarks, accusing Trump of suffering from \u201cemotional overload\u201d.<\/p>\n

Russia said on Tuesday that its huge aerial assaults in recent days were a \u201cresponse\u201d to escalating Ukrainian drone attacks on its own civilians, accusing Kyiv of trying to \u201cdisrupt\u201d peace efforts.<\/p>\n

\u201cKyiv, with the support of some European countries, has taken a series of provocative steps to thwart negotiations initiated by Russia,\u201d the Russian Ministry of Defence said in a statement.<\/p>\n

The ministry said its forces had shot down 99 Ukrainian drones on Tuesday, including 56 over the Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine.<\/p>\n

It claimed that from May 20 to 27, air defence units intercepted more than 2,300 Ukrainian drones \u2013 1,465 of them outside active conflict zones.<\/p>\n

Russia seizes more territory<\/p>\n

In a further setback for Kyiv, Russian troops have captured four villages in Ukraine\u2019s northeastern Sumy region, the local governor confirmed on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

Oleh Hryhorov said Novenke, Basivka, Veselivka and Zhuravka were now under Russian control, though civilians had already been evacuated. \u201cThe enemy is continuing attempts to advance with the aim of setting up a so-called \u2018buffer zone\u2019,\u201d he wrote on Facebook.<\/p>\n

Russia\u2019s Defence Ministry also claimed it had taken the nearby village of Bilovody, pointing to further advances near the border.<\/p>\n

Though Moscow\u2019s main offensive remains in Donetsk, its push into Sumy shows how Russian forces are stretching Ukraine\u2019s army thin across multiple fronts.<\/p>\n

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned again this week that new Russian offensives were likely in Sumy, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia.<\/p>\n

Russian troops have been attacking in small groups on motorcycles, backed by drones. Ukrainian forces say they\u2019re holding the line and targeting enemy positions with precision fire.<\/p>\n

Military blog DeepState reported over the weekend that Russia now holds about 62.6 sq km (24 square miles) in the region \u2013 the first time it has secured a strip of border villages there.<\/p>\n

Last month, a Russian missile killed 36 people in the city of Sumy.<\/p>\n

\"HandoutHandout photograph taken and released by the press service of the Ukrainian army during a training exercise at an undisclosed location near the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region [File: Andriy Andriyenko \/Ukrainian Armed Forces\/ AFP]
\nEurope undermining peace talks, says Russia<\/p>\n

Amid new territorial gains and escalating violence, Russia has shifted blame for the lack of diplomatic progress onto European leaders.<\/p>\n

Putin met Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan on Monday to discuss efforts to end the war in Ukraine, according to a source from Turkiye\u2019s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Fidan also met Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Tuesday as part of his two-day trip to Moscow.<\/p>\n

During the meeting, Lavrov took aim at German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, suggesting his recent comments on Ukraine\u2019s use of Western weapons for strikes deep inside Russia reveal that the decision to greenlight such attacks was made long before it was made public.<\/p>\n

Lavrov said Merz\u2019s statement was telling \u2013 not only for what it implied about policy but for what it revealed about the current crop of Western leaders.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis shows what sort of people have come to power in key European countries,\u201d Lavrov said.<\/p>\n

Merz had earlier stated that weapons supplied to Kyiv by the United Kingdom, France, Germany and the US were no longer bound by range restrictions, clearing the path for deeper attacks into Russian territory.<\/p>\n

\"FinnishGerman Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo attend a joint news conference in Turku, Finland, on May 27, 2025 [Lehtikuva,Roni Rekomaa\/Reuters]<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, while on an official visit to Finland, Merz said Western allies had lifted restrictions on the range of weapons sent to Ukraine. He warned the war could drag on, citing Russia\u2019s refusal to engage in meaningful talks. \u201cWe may have to prepare for a longer duration,\u201d he told reporters.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Moscow accused Ukraine and its European allies of deliberately undermining efforts to revive peace talks. \u201cSince 20 May, Ukraine has ramped up strikes on Russian territory using Western-supplied weapons, deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n

Direct talks between Russia and Ukraine resumed on May 16 \u2013 the first in more than three years \u2013 but failed to result in a ceasefire. Russia has since insisted it is working on a serious draft agreement to end hostilities.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a serious draft, a draft of a serious document that demands careful checks and preparation,\u201d Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said, adding it had not yet been submitted.<\/p>\n

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said the draft would lay out key terms for a political settlement and potential ceasefire, and would be presented to Kyiv once finalised.<\/p>\n

Moscow has accused Ukraine of escalating attacks in recent days to derail the negotiations. In response to media reports about possible new US sanctions, Peskov claimed Washington was trying to sabotage the diplomatic process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Russia and Ukraine have launched a wave of drone attacks against each other overnight, even as Moscow claimed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":136176,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7654],"tags":[32,32302,2000,299,1824,12,285,332,7661,657,333],"class_list":{"0":"post-136175","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ukraine","8":"tag-donald-trump","9":"tag-drone-strikes","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-germany","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-politics","15":"tag-russia","16":"tag-russia-ukraine-war","17":"tag-ukraine","18":"tag-vladimir-putin"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114580355283252895","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136175\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}