U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday expressed deep unhappiness at Russia’s weekend bombing of Ukraine, saying of Russian President Vladimir Putin, “I’m not happy with Putin.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with him. What the hell happened to him? Right? He’s killing a lot of people. I’m not happy about that,” Trump told reporters at the airport in Morristown, New Jersey, as he prepared to return to Washington.
Trump spoke in reaction to a Russian barrage of 367 drones and missiles at Ukrainian cities overnight on Sunday, including the capital Kyiv, in the largest aerial attack of the war so far, killing at least 12 people and injuring dozens more.
Trump has been trying to get both sides to agree to a ceasefire in the three-year-old war in Ukraine and he spoke for more than two hours with Putin last week.
He raised the possibility of imposing more sanctions on Russia in response to the ongoing attacks.
“Always gotten along with him, but he’s sending rockets into cities and killing people, and I don’t like it at all,” Trump said.
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Keith Kellogg, Washington’s special envoy to Ukraine, condemned the Russian attacks on X, calling it “a clear violation” of the Geneva Protocols. “These attacks are shameful. Stop the killing. Ceasefire now.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian missiles and drones hit more than 30 cities and villages, and urged Western partners to ramp up sanctions on Russia — a longstanding demand of the Ukrainian leader but one that despite warnings to Moscow by the United States and Europe has not materialized in ways to deter Russia.
“These were deliberate strikes on ordinary cities,” Zelenskyy wrote on X, adding that Sunday’s targets included Kyiv, Zhytomyr, Khmelnytskyi, Ternopil, Chernihiv, Sumy, Odesa, Poltava, Dnipro, Mykolaiv, Kharkiv and Cherkasy regions.
“America’s silence, the silence of others in the world, only encourages” Putin, he said. “Without truly strong pressure on the Russian leadership, this brutality cannot be stopped. Sanctions will certainly help.”
There was no immediate comment from Moscow on the strikes.
Russia’s Defense Ministry, meanwhile, said its air defenses shot down 110 Ukrainian drones overnight.
In talks held in Istanbul earlier this month — the first time the two sides met face to face for peace talks — Kyiv and Moscow agreed to swap 1,000 prisoners of war and civilian detainees each. The exchange has been the only tangible outcome from the talks.
The swap was completed in three stages this weekend amidst the Russian strikes on Ukraine.
—With additional files from the Associated Press
