By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News

KYIV/BUDAPEST (Worthy News) – Kyiv and Moscow expressed hope that the return of Donald J. Trump to the White House may speed up ending Europe’s deadliest conflict since the Second World War after Ukraine and Russia engaged in their most significant drone strikes in years.

Ukraine launched its most extensive drone attack on the Russian capital city of Moscow Sunday, injuring one person and forcing three significant airports to divert flights, officials said.

Moscow’s regional governor, Andrei Vorobyov, called it a “massive attack” by 34 drones and said two houses in the village of Stanovoye, 15 miles (24 kilometers) southeast of the city, had caught fire after the drones fell.

He said a 52-year-old woman was in intensive care after she was injured by shrapnel and hospitalized with burns to her face, neck and hands.

For its part, Russia launched a record 145 drones overnight, Ukraine said. Kyiv said its air defenses downed 62 of those.

Ukraine also said it attacked an arsenal in the Bryansk region of Russia, which reported 14 drones had been downed in the area.

Unverified Russian video footage on social media showed drones buzzing across the skyline. Russia said that in all its air defenses, she shot down 70 drones, nearly half of them in the skies above Moscow and the rest in western Russia.

UKRAINE AIR FORCE

The situation did not improve Monday when parts of Kyiv were left without power after Ukraine’s air force put the whole country under air raid alerts following the launch of Russian missile attacks. “The air alert is related to the launch of cruise missiles from Tu-95MS strategic bombers,” the Air Force said on social media.

Witnesses reported blasts in the Ukrainian capital in what sounded like air defense systems in operation.

Russian air strikes killed at least six people in southern Ukraine, authorities said on Monday.

Five people were killed in the southern city of Mykolaiv, according to the regional governor. At the same time, a sixth died in Zaporizhzhia in an attack that authorities said wounded more than a dozen.

Yet amid the clashes, Moscow and Ukraine expressed openness for a Trump-brokered peace deal.

After an initial 25-minute post-election call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, during which the president-elect handed the phone to billionaire Elon Musk, was said to have been positive.

No specific peace proposals were discussed. Zelenskyy also thanked Musk for making his Starlink satellite internet service available to his country’s military, which considers it a vital communications tool on the front line.

‘STOP WARS’

Though Trump pledged to “stop wars” in his first speech after his victory over Kamala Harris became apparent last week, analysts say there are no settled outlines of a peace plan yet, giving Kyiv breathing space to press its own case.

However, Ukrainian officials hope it will not lead to a “humiliating defeat.”

With little more than two months left in the White House, Joe Biden is running out of time to expedite the delivery of funds and weaponry needed to ensure Ukraine can stay in the fight against the Russian invasion.

The White House says it is transferring weapons and up to $6 billion in remaining aid to Ukraine as quickly as possible.

Kyiv has reportedly urged the White House to repeal restrictions on long-range weaponry and find other funding sources for the war before Donald J. Trump enters office in January.

Yet the prospect of a major change in Ukraine policy under Trump made it unlikely that Biden’s serious changes would remain in place under the next administration.

Biden is expected to host Trump this week at the White House for a meeting during which the sitting president will urge Trump to continue providing funding to Ukraine.

TENTATIVE HOPE

Yet Ukrainian politicians are expressing tentative hopes that Trump’s return will not necessarily lead to a rapid and humiliating forced peace.

Oleksiy Goncharenko, a Ukrainian opposition legislator, said: “I don’t think that Trump’s victory is a catastrophe.”

The politician added: “Ukraine is now his business, and if negotiations lead to a disaster, it will be his, like Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. This is a person who loves to win.”

Moscow also said the first signs were positive, but it said time would tell when Trump became president.

President-elect Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin last Thursday.

Several people familiar with the matter said it was the first phone conversation between the two men since he won the election.

During the call, which Trump took from his resort in Florida, he advised the Russian president “not to escalate the war in Ukraine” and reminded him of Washington’s “sizable military presence in Europe,” said a person familiar with the call, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

PEACE GOAL

The two men discussed the goal of peace on the European continent, and Trump expressed an interest in follow-up conversations to discuss “the resolution of Ukraine’s war soon,” one of the people said.

Britain, which has pledged 3 billion pounds ($3.8 billion) annually, said it was in Russia’s interest to stop the war as it was paying an “extraordinary price.”

Admiral Tony Radakin, Britain’s chief of the defense staff, said October was Russia’s worst month for losses since the conflict began in February 2022.

“Russia is about to suffer 700,000 people killed or wounded – the enormous pain and suffering that the Russian nation is having to bear because of Putin’s ambition,” he said, adding that the only gains were “tiny increments of land.”

The cost of the war, which he put at more than 40 percent of public expenditure on defense and security, was also “an enormous drain” on Russia.

Copyright 1999-2024 Worthy News. This article was originally published on Worthy News and was reproduced with permission.

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