US President Donald Trump is said to have privately urged Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky to act ‘more boldly’ towards Russia, as Kyiv steps up its attacks in a bid to force Vladimir Putin into talks
Ukraine is understood to have secured US backing to ramp up its attacks on Russia in a bid to force Vladimir Putin into talks, a new report has claimed.
US President Donald Trump is said to have privately told Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky to act “more boldly” in their attacks on Russian infrastructure, a senior Ukrainian official told the Kyiv Independent.
“Trump says he doesn’t really believe Putin will do anything without pressure,” the official, who was briefed on the recent Trump-Zelensky meeting, was quoted as saying.
It comes after Trump said at the G7 summit in France last week that Moscow should “make a deal” to end the Ukraine war, adding: “Russia’s lost tremendous amounts of people, and so has Ukraine.”
Ukraine’s medium-range drones have been disrupting Russia’s supply lines to the front, while its long-range strikes have increasingly damaged oil facilities that provide vital revenue for the Kremlin’s war effort.
Kyiv said on Tuesday that its forces struck a railway bridge, a power plant and other key infrastructure targets in Crimea, as it seeks to isolate the peninsula, which was seized and illegally annexed by Moscow in 2014.
With diplomatic efforts to end the more than four-year conflict stalled, Ukraine has stepped up its campaign to disrupt supply lines and the electricity grid in Crimea during the height of the summer tourist season.
Ukrainian Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said last week that his forces are “isolating Crimea with drones”.
“It looks like in the nearest time, Crimea will become an island. This could lead to some very unexpected consequences for Russians,” Fedorov said on a blogger’s YouTube channel.
Over the weekend, Ukraine’s Defence Ministry said drones struck an oil storage depot at the Kerch thermal power plant in eastern Crimea, an electrical substation in the west, and a liquefied natural gas distribution station in Simferopol, the peninsula’s second-biggest city.
Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces also said its units, working with what it called the resistance movement in Crimea, destroyed a rail bridge over the North Crimean Canal near the village of Rozdolne.
The military described the bridge as a key logistics route supplying Russian forces in southern Ukraine, and said drones began hitting the structure late on Sunday into Monday, causing part of it to collapse.
A second strike early on Tuesday targeted railway repair equipment deployed at the bridge and its remaining sections, the military said on Telegram. Russian officials made no immediate comment.
Parts of Crimea were without power on Tuesday, the region’s energy supplier said, but it attributed the outages to “technical malfunctions” in local electrical grids and said it expected power to be restored within 24 hours.
Kyiv has also stepped up drone strikes deep inside Russia in recent months. hitting oil refineries that fund Moscow’s war effort.
Zelensky said on Saturday that Ukrainian drones had struck an oil refinery in Russia’s Tyumen region, more than 1,200 miles from Ukraine.
The Tyumen refinery, one of Russia’s most modern and complex, has a nominal capacity of around eight million metric tonnes per year. It processes roughly six million tonnes of crude annually, producing about 0.5 million tonnes of petrol and 2.5 million tonnes of diesel, according to industry estimates cited by Reuters.
On Thursday, Ukraine hit the Moscow refinery, located just nine miles from the Kremlin, for the second time that week and the third time in a month.
Thursday saw one of the largest drone attacks on the Russian capital since the start of the full-scale war.
In recent weeks, Russia has intensified its attacks on Ukraine. Russian strikes across the country have killed at least five people and injured 49 others in the past 24 hours, regional authorities said on Tuesday.
