RUSSIA overnight launched the biggest drone attack on Ukraine in the more than three-year war, a Ukrainian official said on Monday. President Donald Trump said Russian leader Vladimir Putin has gone “crazy” by stepping up the bombing of Ukraine just as the US tries to broker peace. The Russian bombardment on Sunday night included 355 drones, Yuriy Ihnat, head of the Ukrainian air force’s communications department, told ‘The Associated Press’. The previous night, Russia fired 298 drones and 69 missiles of various types at Ukraine in what Ukrainians said was the largest combined aerial assault during the conflict. From Friday to Sunday, Russia launched around 900 drones at Ukraine, officials said.

 

The escalation appeared to thwart hopes that Trump’s peace efforts might lead to a breakthrough in the near term, as Putin looks determined to capture more Ukrainian territory and inflict more damage. Russia has this month broken its record for aerial bombardments of Ukraine three times. The expansion of its air campaign came after Kyiv in March accepted an unconditional 30-day ceasefire proposed by the US but Moscow effectively rejected it. Russia is also still pushing along the roughly 1,000-kilometre (620-mile) front line, where it has made slow and costly progress, and is assembling its forces for a summer offensive, Ukraine and military analysts say. “Only a sense of complete impunity can allow Russia to carry out such attacks and continually escalate their scale,” Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on Telegram on Monday.

 

“There is no significant military logic to this, but there is considerable political meaning.” He repeated his call for tighter international economic sanctions on Russia as a way of ending the war, because Russia’s “desire to fight must be deprived of resources”. The European Union’s top diplomat, foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, on Monday described the latest attacks on Kyiv as “totally appalling” and said the bloc intended to impose more sanctions on Russia.