WASHINGTON – A mere hours after President Donald Trump claimed that Vladimir Putin had agreed to stop attacking Ukraine because of the cold weather there, the Russian dictator rained down more than 100 drones and a ballistic missile on the neighbor he is still trying to take by force.
A city bus driver was killed and five civilians injured in Kherson on Friday, according to local media, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reported continuing attacks against residents elsewhere.
“Drone attacks on ordinary residential buildings in cities also continue. A ballistic missile was used against the Kharkiv region – civilian production warehouses were damaged, including those of an American company,” Zelenskyy wrote in a social media post, apparently referring to a facility owned by tobacco giant Philip Morris.
A total of 111 long-range drones and one ballistic missile were launched into Ukraine on Friday, according to the Institute for the Study of War, an independent group tracking Russia’s attacks.
On Thursday afternoon, Trump had boasted how his personal intervention was helping Ukrainians as they struggled through a bitter cold snap that was sending overnight temperatures there below zero degrees Fahrenheit.
“They said they’ve never experienced cold like that, and I personally asked President Putin not to fire into Kyiv and the various towns for a week and he agreed to do that. And I have to tell you, it was very nice. People said, ‘Don’t waste the call, you’re not going to get that,’” Trump said. “And he did it and we’re very happy that they did it because on top of everything else that’s not what they need is missiles coming into their towns and cities.”
On Friday, neither on social media nor during a session with reporters in the Oval Office did he offer any explanation for why Putin is not honoring his purported promise.
Instead, Ukrainian and Russian officials offered different accounts of what they agreed to at three-way talks in Abu Dhabi last weekend. Zelenskyy said the agreement was about the two countries not attacking each other’s energy infrastructure. “Ukraine is ready to mirror the restraint, and today we did not attack Russian energy,” he wrote in a Friday afternoon post.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Putin had agreed to not strike Kyiv specifically, according to the Moscow Times.
“I can say that President Trump did indeed make a personal request to President Putin to refrain from striking Kyiv for a week, until Feb. 1, as a way to create more hospitable conditions for negotiations.”
“Shocked,” joked Robert Kagan, a Brookings Institution analyst and veteran of the Ronald Reagan State Department. A day earlier, after Trump announced Putin’s purported agreement not to attack, Kagan had said that it seemed that Putin was going out of his way to humiliate Trump.
The White House, on Friday, would not respond to questions about Putin’s continuing attacks on Ukraine, notwithstanding Trump’s claimed promise.
Spokeswoman Anna Kelly offered only the following: “As President Trump said, he asked President Putin to withhold strikes on Kyiv for one week amid extremely cold temperatures, and the Russian president agreed to do so. President Trump has done more than anyone to save lives and bring this brutal war to an end.”
Trump, after taking office, stopped sending U.S. military aid to Ukraine, as predecessor Joe Biden had been doing. Instead, Trump is demanding that America’s European allies purchase weapons from the U.S. and, if they so choose, give them to Ukraine.
Trump has often repeated Putin’s talking points about the history of Russia and Ukraine after speaking or meeting with Putin and has even created a moral equivalence between Russia’s ongoing murder of Ukrainian civilians and Ukraine’s retaliatory strikes against the Russian oil industry.