Ukraine Fires Nearly 1,200 Drones at Russia, Seven Killed Including a Child in Three Regions

Ukraine has fired nearly 1,200 drones at Russian targets, in one of its biggest aerial attacks since Moscow’s invasion began almost five years ago.

Russia’s defence ministry said its air defences downed 1,198 Ukrainian long-range drones between late Thursday and early Friday.

However, local officials said strikes on three Russian regions killed seven people, including a 12-year-old, and wounded 17 others.

Amid this massive drone barrage, US and Russian negotiators have raised the stakes in talks to stop the fighting by proposing discussion of the wider European security arrangements in place since the end of the Cold War. Moscow has long sought that change. It has alarmed European leaders and placed a question mark over NATO’s future role.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, referring to the NATO military alliance, said, ‘Russia wants to talk about questions of European security architecture. We don’t need to talk about that. There is one.’

After two days of talks with Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Abu Dhabi this week, US envoys went in person to brief Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who was meeting European leaders in Dublin, Ireland.

US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, said further talks are planned as negotiators seek a breakthrough in peace efforts. Kushner said Russia has agreed to include Europe in upcoming talks, after Moscow’s long insistence that the continent’s governments should be excluded because they were part of the problem by supporting Ukraine.

Kushner said on X that Europe’s presence at the negotiating table will allow negotiators ‘to address the broader postwar European security arrangements alongside the territorial issues between Ukraine and Russia.’

The EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, said in Dublin on Friday that Europe must insist on a ceasefire before taking the negotiations further — the opposite of what Putin demands. ‘If we start to talk about what Russia is asking regarding the security architecture, we actually walk into the traps that Russia is setting us,’ she said.

Luxembourg Prime Minister Luc Frieden insisted that Europe must take its fate into its own hands. ‘We cannot let neither the Americans nor the Russians decide about our future,’ Frieden said.

In an assessment late on Thursday, the Institute for the Study of War said Moscow is aiming ‘to dismantle NATO and the post-Cold War European security architecture.’ Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov reaffirmed that Russia is open for contacts with the Europeans.

Meanwhile, on Friday Zelenskyy repeated his complaints about drone speed limits on the US Starshield system — SpaceX’s military-grade version of the Starlink satellite internet service — which Ukraine needs for its defence. He said the speed restrictions are limiting Ukrainian drones to 161 kph (100 mph) on the entire front line and in Russian-occupied territory, making it impossible for Ukraine to deploy its interceptors effectively against Russia’s fast-moving jet-powered drones.

Zelenskyy said that, after first raising the issue on Thursday, ‘We still have no clear explanations.’ Ukrainian officials are asking the US Department of State, the Pentagon and SpaceX to clarify and resolve the situation, he said.