Russian air attacks killed at least 15 people in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia on Saturday, the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office said. Rescuers were still searching for people trapped under the rubble, President Volodymyr Zelensky said.
Zelensky said earlier in the day that Russia had struck residential buildings in the city. Writing on X, he said Moscow had carried out the attack by “dropping five glide bombs on residential buildings in Zaporizhzhia”.
Al Jazeera’s Audrey MacAlpine, reporting from Kyiv, said daytime attacks were becoming more frequent across Ukraine. A glide bomb hit a bus stop earlier this week, killing 30 people, she said, while jet-powered drones were increasingly striking targets in Kyiv during the day. A recently released video shows a man standing in front of a school who ran from a building on hearing a jet approach, surviving by only a few seconds. “All of this underscores” just how dangerous things have become for civilians, MacAlpine said.
The attacks came a day after US, Ukrainian and European officials met in Miami, Florida, to discuss a proposal to end the war, according to a statement posted on X by US envoy Steve Witkoff. He said the “constructive discussions” explored ways to “de-escalate and conclude the war with Russia ahead of winter”. The meeting included “the E3, the European Commission, Ukraine and NATO”, Witkoff said.
Talks covered energy resilience, grain exports, security guarantees and longer-term arrangements for Ukraine’s and Europe’s security, he added. Witkoff described the discussions as “productive” and said they also touched on Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction and economic prosperity, including EU accession.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Thursday that the conflict had reached a dangerous “stalemate”, and that the failure to reach a negotiated settlement raised the risk of further escalation. “The other way that stalemates end is through escalation,” he told reporters, warning that the conflict could spread to neighbouring NATO countries, according to Al Jazeera.
