{"id":2279,"date":"2025-08-18T15:37:50","date_gmt":"2025-08-18T15:37:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/2025\/08\/18\/russia-pounds-ukraine-kills-more-civilians-before-white-house-meeting\/"},"modified":"2025-08-18T15:37:50","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T15:37:50","slug":"russia-pounds-ukraine-kills-more-civilians-before-white-house-meeting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/2025\/08\/18\/russia-pounds-ukraine-kills-more-civilians-before-white-house-meeting\/","title":{"rendered":"Russia pounds Ukraine, kills more civilians before White House meeting"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Russian attacks on major Ukrainian cities have killed at least 12 people as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visits Washington, DC, supported by European leaders, for high-stakes peace talks<\/a> with United States President Donald Trump that could determine Ukraine\u2019s future and its fate in the war, now in its fourth year.<\/p>\n

An entire family, including a toddler and a 16-year-old, were among seven people killed in an overnight drone strike on a residential neighbourhood in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, authorities said on Monday. The attack also injured 20 people, including six children.<\/p>\n

Russian forces killed five people and injured four in attacks in eastern Ukraine\u2019s Donetsk region, where some of the fiercest fighting on the ground rages on and where Russian President Vladimir Putin, feeling Moscow has the upper hand, seeks Ukraine\u2019s withdrawal from the third of the region Kyiv still controls.<\/p>\n

In Zaporizhzhia, a city in the southeast, 17 people were injured in an attack, according to Governor Ivan Fedorov. Russian air raids also targeted the northeastern region of Sumy and the southern region of Odesa.<\/p>\n

Ukraine\u2019s air force said Russian forces launched 140 drones and four missiles at Ukraine overnight, adding that 88 drones had been downed.<\/p>\n

Russia has been intensifying its fight in Ukraine. According to the United Nations monitoring mission on Ukraine, about 2,600 drone attacks were recorded in the past month, the highest rate since the beginning of the war, and more than 300 civilians were killed.<\/p>\n

\"Smoke
The Russian drone strike on a residential neighbourhood in Kharkiv also injured 20 people, six of whom were children [Handout\/State Emergency Service of Ukraine in Kharkiv via Reuters]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Meanwhile, Ukraine\u2019s military said on Monday that its drones had struck an oil-pumping station in the Tambov region, a strike 1,923km (1,195 miles) from Ukraine, leading to the suspension of supplies via the Druzhba pipeline.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a result of the strike, a fire broke out at the facility. Oil pumping through the Druzhba main oil pipeline was completely stopped,\u201d the Ukrainian military\u2019s General Staff said in a statement.<\/p>\n

In Russia\u2019s border region of Belgorod, four people were injured in a Ukrainian drone attack while Russian officials reported shooting down hundreds of drones and munitions.<\/p>\n

Negotiating an end to the war<\/h2>\n

Zelenskyy called the latest attacks on Ukraine \u201cdemonstrative and cynical\u201d. \u201cPutin will commit demonstrative killings to maintain pressure on Ukraine and Europe, as well as to humiliate diplomatic efforts,\u201d he wrote on X.<\/p>\n

Al Jazeera\u2019s Charles Stratford, reporting from Kyiv, said Zelenskyy saw the killing of civilians as a strategy aimed at giving Trump more bargaining chips with which to pressure Ukraine into accepting an unfavourable peace deal.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis shows how much pressure Zelenskyy is under as he goes into \u2026 potentially the most vital diplomatic effort to end this war,\u201d Stratford said.<\/p>\n

Zelenskyy on Monday was expected to meet Trump for talks at the White House alongside a cadre of heavyweight European leaders, including European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen. On the table for discussion are possible land concessions as well as NATO-like security guarantees that Ukraine requires for any peace deal with Russia.<\/p>\n

To date,\u00a0Zelenskyy has refused to consider<\/a> the possibility of ceding Ukrainian territory to bring about peace. It is also forbidden under the Ukrainian Constitution,<\/p>\n

The meeting comes on the heels of a summit<\/a> between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday that ended with no clear breakthrough on the war in Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Military analyst Sean Bell said he had little hope that a peace deal would come out of the talks in Washington, DC, either. \u201cThe harsh reality is that unless Putin has achieved his objectives, he\u2019s got no appetite for negotiations,\u201d Bell told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf President Zelenskyy is doing all the giving, that\u2019s in effect a surrender. Zelenskyy can\u2019t do that,\u201d he continued. At the same time, Bell said he did not expect Russia to accept a deal that entails NATO-like security guarantees for Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Bell said a \u201ccatalyst\u201d was needed to bring the war to a close, the most effective of which he believed to be Trump\u2019s stiff tariffs on buyers of Russian oil and gas, like India.<\/a> The US president threatened to enact these secondary sanctions but has so far refrained from putting new pressure on Russia\u2019s fossil fuel export revenues.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact that Trump has avoided doing that means the killing is going to continue,\u201d Bell said.<\/p>\n

Strength and safety in numbers appear to be factors in the group visit by European leaders with memories still fresh about the hostile reception<\/a> Zelenskyy received in February from Trump and US Vice President JD Vance in a public White House dressing-down. They castigated the Ukrainian leader as being ungrateful and \u201cdisrespectful\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Source: <\/p>\n

Al Jazeera and news agencies<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Russian attacks on major Ukrainian cities have killed at least 12 people as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visits Washington, DC, supported by European leaders, for high-stakes peace talks with United States President Donald Trump that could determine Ukraine\u2019s future and its fate in the war, now in its fourth year. An entire family, including a toddler … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2280,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2279\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}