Russian attack on Poltava shows Putin does not want peace, Ukraine says

Desmond Milligan · August 19

KYIV (Reuters) -An overnight Russian attack that rocked the central Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk and left hundreds of customers in the Poltava region without power shows that Russian President Vladimir Putin does not want peace, regional Ukrainian officials said.

During a summit at the White House, U.S. President Donald Trump told President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Monday that the United States would help guarantee Ukraine's security in any deal to end Russia's war there.

After the meeting, Trump called the Russian leader and began arranging a meeting between Putin and Zelenskiy.

"At the very same time when Putin was assuring Trump over the phone that he seeks peace, and when President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was holding talks at the White House with European leaders about a just peace, Putin's army launched yet another massive attack on Kremenchuk," Vitalii Maletskyi, mayor of the city that lies in the Poltava region, said on the Telegram messaging app.

Maletskyi added that tens of blasts shook the city.

"Once again, the world has seen that Putin does not want peace — he wants to destroy Ukraine."

The scale of the attack was not clear. Ukraine's Air Force said overnight that the central Ukrainian region was under the threat of a cruise missile attack.

Poltava Governor Volodymyr Kohut said that the attack damaged administrative buildings of a local power infrastructure operation.

"Fortunately, there were no casualties," Kohut said on Telegram.

He said that in the Lubny district nearly 1,500 residential and 119 commercial customers were left without power.

There was no immediate comment from Russia. Both sides have been targeting infrastructure key to the military in their strikes during the war on each other's territory, including energy infrastructure.

Russia said on Tuesday that Ukraine's overnight drone attack sparked fires at an oil refinery and a hospital roof in the Volgograd region.

(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne and Anastassia Malenko in Kyiv; Writing by Lidia Kelly; Editing by Tom Hogue and Kim Coghill)

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