Russia claims Ukraine indefinitely postponed the release while Kyiv maintains it has been delayed until next week.

The air assault killed at least three people. Kharkiv’s mayor described it as “the most powerful attack” since the beginning of the war.

Russia bombarded Ukraine’s second-largest city with massive strikes in the early hours of Saturday, its mayor said, one night after Moscow carried out one of the war’s largest aerial assaults on Ukraine.

A large Russian drone-and-missile attack targeted Ukraine's eastern city of Kharkiv on Saturday, killing at least three people and injuring 21, local officials said. The barrage — the latest in near daily widescale attacks — included aerial glide bombs that have become part of a fierce Russian onslaught in the three-year war.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy refuted President Donald Trump's characterization of the war between Russia and Ukraine.

But halting progress, ever-more deadly drone attacks and unmoving negotiating positions seem to have taken their toll. On Thursday, Trump used a striking analogy to concede the warfare was nowhere near over, and that he did not, at that moment, feel it was best to intervene.

Satellite photos analyzed by The Associated Press on Wednesday show seven destroyed bombers on the tarmac at a Russian air base in eastern Siberia, one of the targets Ukraine said it struck with drones in one of the most daring covert operations of the war.