6 killed as Russia, Ukraine trade accusations after Abu Dhabi talks

Russian casualties reported

Russia and Ukraine traded accusations over overnight airstrikes on Friday, with at least six people killed after two days of US-mediated peace talks ended in Abu Dhabi earlier this week.

Volgograd Gov. Andrey Bocharov said in a statement on Telegram that debris from downed Ukrainian drones had fallen at an enterprise in the southern industrial zone of the regional capital and across the surrounding area, starting localized fires. He initially reported no casualties or damage to residential infrastructure before saying that the overnight Ukrainian attack had killed four people and injured two others.

Bocharov said damage in the settlement of Svetly Yar included residential buildings and a youth center: “In the settlement of Svetly Yar, the glazing of windows and balconies has been damaged in three five-story residential buildings and a youth center. There are no casualties,” he said. Municipal authorities were instructed to assess the damage and conduct cleanup and repair work.

Drone claims from Russia

Rostov Gov. Yury Slyusar said one person was injured after drone debris damaged buildings in Rostov-on-Don and several districts of the southern Russian region. The affected infrastructure included residential buildings, a production facility and a warehouse, according to Slyusar.

Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin claimed that 467 drones had been downed between 1500GMT Thursday and 0500GMT Friday while heading toward the Moscow region, including 144 intercepted as they approached the capital. The Russian Defense Ministry claimed it had downed 1,198 Ukrainian drones across 17 regions, over the Black Sea and over Crimea, which Moscow illegally annexed in 2014.

Strikes reported in Ukraine

Ukraine’s Air Force claimed that Russian forces launched 117 attack drones overnight and that 80 of them were shot down. In Kyiv, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service department said a Russian attack damaged a hospital in the Shevchenkivskyi district and injured one person.

The Ukrainian service said: “Thirty people were evacuated to a safe location by the medical facility's staff, and seven more people were rescued by State Emergency Service rescuers,” adding that a fire at the hospital had been extinguished. Rivne Gov. Oleksandr Koval said six people were injured after a drone struck a multistory building in the regional capital.

Odesa Gov. Oleh Kiper reported one person killed and five injured in his region after a Russian strike damaged residential buildings and passenger cars, while rescuers and relevant services worked on the aftermath. Authorities in Cherkasy, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Sumy, Vinnytsia and Zaporizhzhia also reported damage from overnight strikes, with the latter region saying that a 17-year-old boy had been killed.

Peace talks and continued attacks

Independent verification of the Russian and Ukrainian claims remains difficult because the war is ongoing. The strikes came two days after US-mediated peace talks between Russia and Ukraine concluded in the UAE on Tuesday and Wednesday, with plans for a large-scale prisoner exchange among the results and the specifics still under discussion.

The trilateral negotiations were the first since February, when Russian, Ukrainian and American representatives met in Geneva, Switzerland. That meeting followed two rounds of peace talks in Abu Dhabi, while US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner later met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Thursday and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Dublin later that evening.

Kushner said the negotiations since Tuesday had produced “meaningful progress in understanding both sides’ concerns, identifying possible solutions, and establishing a path forward.” He said on the US social media platform X: “Both sides have now agreed to expand the next round of negotiations to include our European partners. This will allow us to address the broader postwar European security arrangements alongside the territorial issues between Ukraine and Russia,” he said.