Peace in Ukraine would be on Moscow’s terms, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has claimed, as his country’s troops continued to launch air strikes on Tuesday.
Mr Medvedev, who is now deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, insisted that the country was on course to seize more parts of Ukraine.
He said: “Russia will achieve all its goals. There will be peace – on our terms.”
On Tuesday, Russia dropped missiles over Ukraine while nearing its sixth month of war since Putin launched the invasion on 24 February.
At least one person was killed in a missile strike on the centre of Kramatorsk, the governor of the Donetsk region said.
Buildings in a town in the Kharkiv region were also hit. Footage shows piles of rubble being cleared by excavators.
A 75-year-old man died of injuries suffered as a result of the shelling in the last 24 hours, the Kharkiv region’s governor Oleh Synegubov wrote on social media.
In Odesa, in southern Ukraine, firefighters fought blazes sparked by missile attacks that burned many people’s homes to the ground.
Oleksii Matsulevych, a spokesman for Odesa’s regional administration, said on Telegram that four people were injured in the air strikes.
Andriy Yermak, head of Ukraine’s presidential office, wrote on Twitter that the houses had been struck by seven Russian Kalibr cruise missiles.
He wrote: “A terrorist state is longing to defeat those (who are) fearless with fear. We will neither break nor give up.”
In response, Russia’s defence ministry said its forces had destroyed ammunition depots in the area that were storing weapons supplied to Kyiv by the US and European countries – a claim news agency Reuters said it could not immediately verify.
Russia says it does not deliberately target civilians or civilian infrastructure and only uses precision weapons to break down the Ukrainian military.
The Ukrainian army said that Russian troops have been focusing on strengthening their positions in areas they have already seized because their limited ground assaults have been unsuccessful.
In their latest major gain earlier this month, Russian troops captured the city of Lysychansk, in the separatist-controlled Luhansk oblast in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
Recently there have been reports that the troops are stalling. Last week, Britain’s Ministry of Defence said it believed Russian forces were unable to advance because of a lack of soldiers.
The MoD said Russia has to now decide how much weaponry and manpower to use to achieve its goal of seizing full control of the Donetsk area – also in the Donbas region – and to react to any Ukrainian counter-attack in the south.
