Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Friday evening that Russia had almost completely halted its attacks on Ukrainian energy facilities since Thursday under a temporary US-backed moratorium — but stressed that Moscow’s forces had shifted their focus to striking logistical targets instead.
“Across all our regions, since the night into Friday, there were truly no strikes on energy facilities — almost none,” Zelensky said in his nightly address to Ukrainians. The sole exception was a Russian aerial bomb strike on gas infrastructure in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, he said.
Zelensky added that Ukraine had not struck Russian energy facilities on Friday and that Kyiv's approach would continue to be “reciprocal” depending on Moscow’s actions.
US President Donald Trump first announced the moratorium on strikes on energy infrastructure on Thursday, claiming that Vladimir Putin had agreed “not to fire into Kyiv and various towns for a week” during a period of “extreme cold” in Ukraine.
While the pause in energy strikes appeared to hold through Friday, Zelensky said, the Russian military continued its “usual drone and aerial-bomb attacks” on other locations across Ukraine and ramped up its strikes on “logistics and junction stations”.
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said on Friday that Russia had carried out at least seven drone attacks on railway facilities since Thursday as it switched to “deliberately striking Ukraine’s logistics routes” rather than energy infrastructure.
On Saturday, Donetsk region Governor Vadym Filashkin said a Russian drone had struck a vehicle carrying municipal workers returning from repair work at an infrastructure facility near the frontline city of Sloviansk on Friday, killing one person and injuring two more.
Large parts of Ukraine including Kyiv, as well as neighbouring Moldova, were hit by emergency power outages on Saturday following a “technical malfunction” in the country’s power grid, Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal said.
While the Trump administration had spoken about “refraining from strikes on energy infrastructure for a week”, Zelensky said, the Kremlin suggested on Friday that it would only halt its attacks until Sunday, when delegations from Moscow and Kyiv are expected to meet for a second round of talks in Abu Dhabi.
Putin had agreed to Trump’s request to stop strikes on energy facilities to create “favourable conditions” for those talks, Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.
According to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Washington’s presence at Sunday’s talks will be more limited than the previous round, with US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner not expected to attend.
