Russia and Ukraine trade long-range drone attacks as Putin says Moscow is ready for new peace talks

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia and Ukraine exchanged more long-range drone attacks that have become a staple of the more than three-year war, officials said Friday, as Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow is ready for a fresh round of direct peace talks in Istanbul.

Russian and Ukrainian officials are discussing the timing of a potential new meeting, Putin said. Speaking to reporters during a visit to Belarus, he said that the terms of a potential ceasefire, which the Kremlin has so far effectively rejected, are expected to be on the agenda.

The war shows no signs of abating as U.S.-led international peace efforts have so far produced no breakthrough. Two recent rounds of talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Istanbul were brief and yielded no progress on reaching a settlement.

Ukraine wants the next step in peace talks to be a meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Putin, Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov said.

The suggestion is likely a non-starter, given Putin’s recent comments. The Russian leader has said a summit meeting should take place only after the main provisions of a peace deal have been agreed, and that could take months or years.

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Putin has also repeated his claim that Zelenskyy lost his legitimacy after his presidential term expired last year — an allegation rejected by Kyiv and its allies.

Meanwhile, Russian forces launched 363 Shahed and decoy drones as well as eight missiles at Ukraine overnight, the Ukrainian air force said Friday, claiming that air defenses stopped all but four of the drones and downed six cruise missiles.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said 39 Ukrainian drones were downed in several regions overnight, including 19 over the Rostov region and 13 over the Volgograd region. Both regions lie east of Ukraine.

Long-range drone strikes have been a hallmark of the war, now in its fourth year. The race by both sides to develop increasingly sophisticated and deadlier drones has turned the war into a testing ground for new weaponry.

Ukrainian drones have pulled off some stunning feats. At the start of June, nearly a third of Moscow’s strategic bomber fleet was destroyed or damaged in a covert Ukrainian operation using cheaply made drones sneaked into Russian territory.

The Ukrainian air force said that 359 incoming drones were either intercepted or electronically jammed.

Ukraine is employing new countermeasures against Russia’s escalation of combined missile and drone attacks, officials say. Instead of relying on ground-based mobile teams to shoot down Shaheds, Ukraine is deploying interceptor drones it has developed.

The Ukrainian attack forced three Russian airports to briefly suspend flights, officials said. The authorities also briefly closed the Crimean Bridge overnight as drones targeted Crimea.

Neither Russia nor Ukraine reported any major damage or casualties in the attacks.

Russia manufactures Shahed drones based on an original Iranian model, churning out thousands of them at a plant in the Tatarstan region. It has upgraded the Shaheds with its own innovations, including bigger warheads.

They are known as suicide drones because they nosedive into targets and explode on impact, like a missile. The incessant buzzing of the propeller-driven Shahed drones is unnerving for anyone under its flight path because no one on the ground knows exactly when or where the weapon will hit.

Being outgunned and outnumbered in the war against its bigger neighbor, Ukraine also has developed its own cutting-edge drone technology, including long-range sea drones, and has trained thousands of drone pilots.

Smaller, short-range drones are used by both sides on the battlefield and in areas close to the roughly 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line.

Those drones, fitted with onboard cameras that give their operators a real-time view of possible targets, have also struck civilian areas.

The U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said in a report published Thursday that short-range drone attacks killed at least 395 civilians and injured 2,635 between the start of the war and last April. Almost 90% of the attacks were by the Russian armed forces, it reported.

The strikes not only spread fear among civilians but also severely disrupt daily life by restricting movement and limiting access to food and medical services, the report said.

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Associated Press writer Samya Kullab in Kyiv, Ukraine, contributed to this report.

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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine