Day after Trump spat venom, Russian airstrikes kill child

Kyiv: A Russian drone struck an apartment building in a southeastern Ukraine city, killing three people and injuring 10 others, officials said Friday, a day after US President Donald Trump rebuked Russia’s leader for a deadly missile and drone attack on Kyiv while Washington is endeavouring to stop the more than three-year war.

A child and a 76-year-old woman were among the civilians killed in the nighttime drone strike in Pavlohrad, in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, the head of the regional administration, Serhii Lysak, wrote on Telegram.

Russian forces fired 103 Shahed and decoy drones at five Ukrainian regions overnight, Ukraine’s air force reported. Authorities in the northeastern Sumy and Kharkiv regions reported damage to civilian infrastructure but no casualties.

The war could be approaching a pivotal moment as the Trump administration weighs its options. Senior US officials have warned that the administration could soon give up attempts to stop the war if the two sides do not come to an agreement.

Meanwhile, Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff met President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Friday to discuss a U.S. plan to end the Ukraine war on terms that Kyiv and its European allies fear are too advantageous to Moscow.

Witkoff has emerged as Washington’s key interlocutor with Putin as Trump pushes for a deal to end the war, now well into its fourth year, and has already held three long meetings with the Kremlin leader. His latest trip follows talks this week at which Ukrainian and European officials pushed back against some of the U.S. proposals for how to settle the conflict, the deadliest in Europe since World War Two.

Video published by the Kremlin showed Witkoff and Putin shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries before sitting down on opposite sides of a white oval table.

Putin was accompanied by his foreign policy

adviser Yuri Ushakov.