Ukrainian drones attack Moscow for the second night in a row. Trump sees a minerals deal with Ukraine as leverage over Russia in peace talks. Russia sends 136 drones into Ukraine, 124 miss target.
Ukraine drones attack Moscow for second night in a row
Ukrainian drones targeted Moscow and the surrounding region as well as several other Russian regions early on Tuesday. The attack led to disruptions at 13 airports. Russian forces shot down 105 Ukrainian drones over 11 regions, Russia’s defense ministry said.
The attacks hit the Russian capital for the second night in a row. Drone debris damaged an apartment building on Kashirskoye Highway, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on social media. He added that at least 19 Ukrainian drones were destroyed on their approach to Moscow, causing no major destruction or injuries. Social media reports also suggested there was damage near the Kashirskaya subway station in Moscow.
A Ukrainian drone attack forced Moscow to close its airports for several hours overnight. Flights were also halted at the airports of Saratov, Ivanovo, Nizhny Novgorod, Yaroslavl, Samara, Volgograd and Kaluga.
In the city of Borisoglebsk, in the Voronezh region, drone wreckage fell on a children’s playground located on the waterfront, starting a fire, Russian Telegram channels said. The fire burnt down a slide there. The city’s residents said they heard seven explosions overnight.
Trump sees minerals deal with Ukraine as leverage over Russia in peace talks
U.S. President Trump signed off on a minerals deal with Ukraine to get more leverage over Russia in peace negotiations, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday.
“The economic partnership was his idea, and he believed that it would do several things,” Bessent told an audience during his keynote address at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles.
“It would create more leverage for him with the Russian leadership when it was time to go to them. So the idea was, start with Ukraine, sign a deal that shows that there is no daylight between the U.S. and Ukrainian people,” he said.
“It would be a symbol to Ukrainian people that the U.S. is still there. It would be a symbol to a tired American public, skeptical of more financial commitments that it was possible to have a shared prosperity with Ukraine, and then it would, in essence, be a tacit security guarantee because of the economic partnership,” Bessent said.
The U.S. and Ukraine signed a minerals framework deal on April 30. The deal represents payback for the money the U.S. has spent on assistance to Ukraine so far, President Donald Trump told NewsNation last week. The document covers 57 types of natural resources and has a mention of U.S. military aid to Ukraine, Ukrainian news site European Pravda said.
Ukraine’s Parliament is expected to hold a vote to ratify the deal not later than May 8, the country’s Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said.
At the time of writing, additional technical agreements were not yet finalized. They are key to understanding what the minerals deal will bring Ukraine.
Russia sends 136 drones into Ukraine, 124 miss target
The Ukrainian Air Force said it shot down 54 out of 136 drones launched by Russia during an overnight attack on Tuesday. Seventy more disappeared off radar after likely being disabled by electronic warfare systems. At 10:30 a.m. when the report was released, combat action against a remaining drone was underway, the military added.
The drones were launched from the area of Russia’s Bryansk, Kursk, Oryol, Millerovo, Primorsko-Akhtarsk and from the city of Prymorsk in the part of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region that Russia currently occupies.
The Air Force and other branches of the Ukrainian military deployed aircraft, surface-to-air missile troops, electronic warfare units and mobile groups to repel the attack.
The regions of Kharkiv, Odesa and Dnipro sustained damage.
