Fire fighters tackle a blaze following a Russian airstrike on the Odesa region, 4 February 2026. Photo: State Emergency Service of Ukraine
Russian drone strikes on Ukraine killed four people on Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, the Ukrainian authorities said, as delegations from Moscow and Kyiv prepared for a second round of US-brokered talks in Abu Dhabi later on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, Russian forces struck the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia in the early evening as people were returning home from work, killing two 18-year-olds and injuring 11 more people, Zaporizhzhia region Governor Ivan Fedorov said.
According to the Zaporizhzhia Region Military Administration, an air raid alert had been ongoing in the city for 23 hours at the time of the attack.
In the early hours of Wednesday, Russia then launched a separate drone strike on the town of Vasylkivka in the central Dnipropetrovsk region, Governor Oleksandr Hanzha said, killing two people and injuring two others.
Russia’s strikes came as Moscow and Kyiv’s delegations, as well as US President Donald Trump’s Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner, arrived in the UAE ahead of Wednesday’s trilateral talks aimed at ending the war.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Tuesday that the work of the country’s negotiating team would be “adjusted accordingly” following devastating Russian airstrikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure earlier that day.
Those strikes, the largest Russian aerial assault of the year so far, left thousands of households in Kyiv and other cities across Ukraine without heat and power in temperatures as low as -25C and marked a definitive end to a brief US-backed pause in strikes on energy infrastructure.
Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday that Vladimir Putin had “kept his word” regarding the temporary energy truce, which he said had lasted from Sunday 25 January to Sunday 1 February, adding that, after that pause, “it opened up and [Putin] hit them hard” at the start of the week.
On Tuesday, Zelensky said that Kyiv would await a US reaction to the latest attack, which he said took place on the fourth day of the “week Russia was asked to hold off”.
On Wednesday, Ukraine’s Ambassador to Washington Olha Stefanishyna told reporters that the embassy had passed details of “all the attacks that have taken place since the announcement of Russia’s so-called agreement to a truce” to the US State Department, which she said she hoped would persuade the Trump administration to take an approach of “fewer illusions, more pressure” towards Moscow.
