Two people died and four were hospitalised on Friday after a Russian drone struck a petrol station in Kyiv in the early hours of the morning. The attack landed just hours before Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky took the stage at the Yalta European Strategy forum and delivered an unusually blunt message to Washington. "Sanctions need to be imposed now," Zelensky told the forum's audience. He added that he did not understand why decisions could not be made quickly — a pointed remark directed at the Trump administration, which has been leading diplomatic efforts to end the four-and-a-half-year war.

Zelensky also confirmed that he planned to meet Donald Trump in late September, raising hopes of a fresh breakthrough, even as front-line negotiations remain deadlocked. US-led talks on ending what has become Europe's deadliest conflict since the Second World War have so far failed to produce a ceasefire. Zelensky separately called for a partial truce covering strikes on energy infrastructure, warning that Ukraine was fully prepared to retaliate if Russia attacked its power grid during the coming winter. Both sides have dramatically escalated long-range drone and missile strikes on each other in recent months, and Kyiv's energy network has been a repeated target since Moscow began its full-scale invasion.

"Russia knows that if they strike, they will receive the same in return," Zelensky said — language that signals Kyiv is using the threat of mutual destruction, rather than diplomacy alone, as its main deterrent.