KIEV, Oct 8 (Reuters) – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy accused the United States of not being willing to help Ukraine after a Russian bombing attack on Thursday killed at least 30 people in the east of the country, raising the death toll to more than 70 in two days due to Russian strikes.
Hours after the attack on the besieged city of Kramatorsk hit two buses, Zelenskiy criticized Washington’s efforts to maintain economic ties with Russia, while seeking to mediate the war that has already lasted more than four years.
The morning attack came a day after a mass assault with drones and missiles by Russia killed dozens of people across Ukraine — 22 of them in a residential building in the city of Pryluky, in the central region of the country, about 130 km east of Kyiv.
Seventy-eight people were killed and another 215 wounded in attacks in the last two days across Ukraine, Zelenskiy said.
In remarks to reporters in Pryluky, the Ukrainian leader urged the United States to heed his requests to expand Ukraine’s access to the Starlink satellite service to help the country reach Russian ballistic missile launchers.
“This is called a lack of will”
“Open Starlink for Ukraine. You opened it when you were responding to Iran… I said quite openly: give it to us, help us defend our skies and to master this area. And then Putin will sit at the negotiating table,” he said in an emotional statement.
In recent months, Ukraine has sought to take the initiative on the battlefield from Russia, whose advances have waned this year, but it still suffers from Moscow’s increasingly brutal air war.
“So where is the truth here, where is the honesty? Where is the stalemate? … This is called a lack of will,” he said, referring to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s statement on Thursday that the war is at a stalemate and that the United States would continue working toward a deal.
“One cannot, on the one hand, negotiate with the Russians about future economic projects and, on the other hand, say that we are in some kind of… diplomatic deadlock,” Zelenskiy added.
Senior Russian and American officials, including the U.S. special envoy Jared Kushner, held talks about the entry of a U.S. investor into the Nord Stream pipelines, which carried Russian gas to Germany before Moscow invaded Ukraine, Reuters said on Thursday.
Ukrainian negotiators will be in the United States on Friday and Saturday for talks, Zelenskiy added, urging U.S. President Donald Trump to step up sanctions pressure on Russia.
Intensification of Attacks
Eighteen people were wounded in the attack on Kramatorsk — one of the largest isolated attacks of the year carried out by Russia. Moscow denied targeting civilians, but regularly bombs cities with missiles and drones.
“The Russians are deliberately attacking civilians. For them, a bus with passengers is an attractive target precisely because a single attack can kill the largest possible number of people,” said regional governor Vadym Filashkin on the Telegram app.
Images released by authorities showed bodies scattered on a rubble-filled street and the charred wreckage of a bus. Some bodies had not yet been identified, Zelenskiy said, adding that the attack would not go unpunished.
Separately on Thursday, three people died and 14 were wounded in morning attacks on the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, according to mayor Vitali Klitschko.
Russia has been launching relentless drone attacks against Kyiv in recent weeks, targeting warehouses, data centers, and resuming its campaign against Ukraine’s power grid ahead of winter.
“Putin and his regime have no intention of stopping the deaths,” said Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha on X.
“On the contrary, they are intensifying it, turning civilians’ daily lives into targets of Russian bombs.”
