FLASH
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Russia has intensified its attacks on Ukraine's southern Odessa region, causing widespread power outages and threatening the region's naval infrastructure.
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Kuleba said Moscow was carrying out "systematic" attacks in the region.
Last week, he warned that the focus of the war "may have shifted towards Odessa."
President Volodymyr Zelensky said the repeated attacks were an attempt by Moscow to block Ukraine's access to naval logistics.
Earlier in December, Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to cut off Ukraine's access to the sea in retaliation for drone attacks on tankers of Russia's "shadow fleet" in the Black Sea.
The "shadow fleet" is a term that refers to the hundreds of tankers used by Russia to circumvent Western sanctions imposed after its full invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
On Monday evening, attacks hit port infrastructure in Odessa, damaging a civilian ship, the regional governor said.
Last week, a ballistic missile attack on the port of Pivdenniy east of Odessa killed eight people and injured at least 30 others.
Another attack earlier in the week killed a woman traveling in a car with her three children and temporarily cut off the Odessa region's only bridge connecting Ukraine and Moldova.
The port of Odessa has always been key to the country's economy. The city is the third largest in Ukraine after Kiev and Kharkiv. It now has strategic importance as other ports in the Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Mykolayiv regions are inaccessible to Ukraine due to the Russian occupation.
Despite the war, Ukraine remains one of the world's leading exporters of wheat and corn.
Since August 2023, Odessa has been the starting point of an important corridor that allows it to export grain abroad, following the coastlines of Romania and Bulgaria before reaching Turkey.
Zelensky, who has previously accused Russia of "sowing chaos" on the people of Odessa, said that "everyone should see that without pressure on Russia, they have no intention of truly ending their aggression."
His comments came as the latest round of U.S.-led diplomatic efforts wrapped up in Miami. The U.S. met separately with Ukrainian and Russian delegations, with the meetings producing optimistic statements but no clear progress toward bringing an end to Moscow's nearly four-year war with Ukraine closer.
US President Donald Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff, said he and his Ukrainian counterpart, Rustem Umerov, had been working to "align positions" on a 20-point draft peace plan presented by Ukraine earlier this month. The plan is an alternative to a proposal presented by the US in November, which was seen as favorable to Moscow.
Before Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev returned to Moscow from Florida, Kremlin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters that European and Ukrainian changes to the peace proposal would not improve the chances of achieving peace.
On Monday, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov accused EU countries of having a "strong aspiration" to hinder potential Russia-US agreements on Ukraine and "in general to prevent Russian-US relations from improving."
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