KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainians shared their disappointment Saturday that the U.S. may not provide Kyiv with long-range Tomahawk missiles, while work to repair the damaged power supply to the country's Zaporizhzhia power plant soothed other concerns surrounding Europe's largest nuclear plant.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with President Donald Trump at the White House on Friday, after the U.S. leader signaled that Washington could provide
Ukraine with the long-range missiles Kyiv believes will help bring Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table.
Yet Zelenskyy ultimately left empty-handed — an outcome that dismayed, but did not surprise, many in the streets of the Ukrainian capital, who maintained their determination to end Russia’s 3 1/2-year invasion of their country.
One Ukrainian military serviceman, Roman Vynnychenko, told The Associated Press that he believed the prospect of Tomahawk missiles for Ukraine was a political “game.” “Ukraine won’t get those missiles,” he said.
Vynnychenko said Ukraine still needed to procure new weapons with or without American help, particularly as Russian drones and missiles continued to hit civilian infrastructure.
"Every day civilians and soldiers die, buildings collapse, our streets and cities are being destroyed,” Vynnychenko said.
Russia invaded its smaller neighbor in February 2022, sparking a 3 1/2-year conflict that has become a grinding war of attrition across a 1,250-kilometer (780-mile) frontline in Ukraine’s east and south.
Trump’s frustration with the conflict has surfaced repeatedly in the nine months since he returned to office. In recent weeks, he had shown growing impatience with Putin and expressed greater openness to helping Ukraine win the war, including with the sale of Tomahawks.
But Trump’s tone shifted again after he held a lengthy phone call with Putin on Thursday and announced that he planned to meet with the Russian leader in Budapest, Hungary, in the coming weeks.
The talks raise new hopes that diplomatic progress could be made to end the war. But after multiple failed starts, Ukrainians are reluctant to believe that a significant breakthrough will take place soon.
“To tell you the truth, I look at the news, but nowadays I read only the headlines. And even those make me sad," Victoria Khramtsova, a psychologist, told the AP. "We have been at war for more than three years. We just want peace."
In the meantime, Russia continued its aerial bombardment of Ukraine, launching three missiles and 164 drones overnight, Ukraine’s Air Force said Saturday. It said that Ukrainian forces shot down 136 of the drones.
Two people were injured after Russian drones targeted a gas station in the Zarichny district of Sumy in northeast Ukraine, local officials said Saturday. They were two women aged 51 and 53, according to regional Gov. Oleh Hryhorov.
Elsewhere, work has begun to repair the damaged power supply to Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the head of the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog said Saturday. The repairs are hoped to end a precarious four-week outage that saw it dependent on backup generators.
Russian and Ukrainian forces established special ceasefire zones for repairs to be safely carried out, said the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi. He hailed the restoration of off-site power as “crucial for nuclear safety and security.”
“Both sides engaged constructively with the IAEA to enable the complex repair plan to proceed,” Grossi said in a statement.
Work is due to be carried out in two phases, first on the Ferosplavna-1 power line, then the Dniprovska power line, the IAEA said. She also said that it was the 42nd time since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022 that power lines to the plant had to be restored.
The Zaporizhzhia plant, Europe’s largest nuclear power station, has been operating on diesel backup generators since Sept. 23 when its last remaining external power line was severed in attacks that Russia and Ukraine each blamed on the other.
The plant is in an area under Russian control since early in Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and is not in service, but it needs reliable power to cool its six shutdown reactors and spent fuel, to avoid any catastrophic nuclear incidents.
Grossi said Saturday that emergency diesel generators were designed to be the “last line of defense” to help nuclear power plants cool their reactors, but that their use was now “an all too common occurrence.”
"As long as this devastating conflict goes on, nuclear safety and security remains under severe threat. Today, we had some rare positive news to report, but we are far from being out of the woods yet,” Grossi said.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
