Russia’s latest strikes on Ukraine’s energy facilities have left hundreds of thousands without power and heating during a cold winter, as Kyiv and Washington continue to negotiate a framework for peace.

The country’s fourth-largest city of Dnipro and its surrounding region, as well as neighboring Zaporizhzhia region, came under a massive Russian drone and missile attack on Wednesday, according to local authorities. Ukraine’s biggest private energy company DTEK said the resulting power outages affected around 600,000 households in the Dnipropetrovsk region. Zaporizhzhia region faced a total blackout, its governor Ivan Fedorov said in a Telegram post.

“This is Russia’s war specifically against our people, against life in Ukraine – an attempt to break Ukraine,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a post on X, saying that such attacks have no strategic rationale. “Diplomatic discussions cannot be a pretext for slowing down the supply of air defense systems,” he added.

The attack came amid negotiations between Zelenskyy’s team and the U.S. on bringing an end to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion. This week, the Ukrainian leader said that his team was ready to discuss the “most difficult issues” with President Donald Trump’s envoys after negotiators secured a breakthrough on security guarantees for Kyiv.

Those guarantees are now “essentially ready” to be finalized with Trump, Zelenskyy said in a post on X on Thursday. The Ukrainian leader earlier said that he soon expects to meet Trump for discussions.

As U.S., Ukrainian and European officials seek to remove remaining stumbling blocks before presenting a deal to Moscow, the talks will now move to the so-far intractable issues around territorial control.

Russia has so far stuck to its maximalist demands, insisting that Ukraine hand over territory Moscow claims but does not fully control. A further sticking point is control over a nuclear power plant — Europe’s largest — in the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia region.

On Thursday, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said an agreement on security guarantees for Ukraine reached in Paris by the so-called Coalition of the Willing, which includes mostly European allies, was “aimed not at achieving lasting peace and security, but at continuing the militarization, escalation and expansion of the conflict.”

She warned the deployment of Western military units on Ukrainian territory would be seen as “posing a direct threat” to Russia and would be legitimate targets for the Moscow’s military.

U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham said earlier on Thursday that Trump had “greenlit” a bipartisan Russia sanctions bill targeting countries buying sanctioned oil. The Republican lawmaker said he hoped for a vote on the measure as soon as next week. A White House official confirmed that Trump supported the legislation, Bloomberg earlier reported.

Electricity supply to the Zaporizhzhia region was restored later on Thursday. However, the outages also disrupted heating and water supplies during a cold spell. Emergency services are working to restore supplies to critical infrastructure, including hospitals, while emergency stations were set up to provide civilians with hot food and electricity from generators, local authorities said. The situation in Dnipro and its surroundings remains complicated, the city’s mayor Borys Filatov said in a post on Facebook.

Zelenskyy said that he had instructed Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko to provide all necessary support to local authorities, according to his post on X.

The current strike followed an attack on the southern port city of Odesa, which killed at least one.

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