KYIV — Russia fired hundreds of drones at Ukraine on Wednesday, killing at least five people and destroying a postal terminal, Ukrainian officials said. The attacks came a day after the Kremlin rejected a Ukrainian proposal for a temporary ceasefire over Easter. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Wednesday he had had a “positive” call with US negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner about reviving the peace process. Diplomatic efforts to end Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, now in its fifth year, have stalled in recent months, in part because the United States has shifted its focus towards the Iran war. The two sides had agreed to “strengthen security guarantees”, he added. “Ukraine is doing everything it can to support efforts for peace,” Zelenskyy said in his evening address. NATO chief Mark Rutte and US Senator Lindsey Graham also took part in the call, Zelensky said. Zelesnky’s remarks came after Russian drones damaged sites in western Ukraine near the Polish border early on Wednesday, including an industrial facility in the city of Lutsk, some 400 kilometres west of Kyiv. Ukraine’s Nova Poshta mailing company published an image showing a warehouse in Lutsk in flames following a Russian attack, thick smoke pouring from its roof. Mayor Ihor Polishchuk said a postal sorting centre and a food distribution site were damaged, and falling drone debris also set a residential building on fire. Russia fired 339 drones at Ukraine overnight, and more than 360 drones during the day, according to the Ukrainian air force. A Russian drone killed four people in the central Cherkasy region. An earlier drone strike on a car in Ukraine’s frontline Kherson region killed a woman and badly wounded two other people, regional authorities said. Meanwhile, Russia also stepped up pressure on the front line, claiming on Wednesday to have taken two villages in eastern Ukraine and fully occupied the Luhansk region, suggesting they have wrested control of an area that had remained beyond their grasp since the beginning of their 2022 invasion. “Units of the ‘West’ military grouping have completed the liberation of the Luhansk People’s Republic,” the ministry said in a statement on Wednesday, using Moscow’s preferred name for theUkrainian region. There was no immediate confirmation of the development from Ukraine. Russia’s Defence Ministry added that Russian forces also took control of the village of Verkhnya Pysarivka in northeastern Ukraine’s Kharkiv region and the village of Boikove in the Zaporizhia region in southeastern Ukraine. Luhansk and Donetsk make up the wider Donbas area. More than 99 percent of Luhansk has long been under Russian control and was one of four Ukrainian regions Moscow annexed in 2022. Russia also controls about three-quarters of Donetsk. The Kremlin on Wednesday reiterated its demand that Ukrainian forces withdraw from the entirety of Donetsk, which Kyiv has repeatedly dismissed. — Agencies
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