KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday described the performance of the air force in parts of the country as “unsatisfactory," and said that steps are being taken to improve the response to large-scale Russian drone barrages of civilian areas.
The repeated Russian aerial assaults have in recent months focused on Ukraine’s power grid, causing blackouts and disrupting the heating and water supply for families during a bitterly cold winter.
Click to Gallery
People evacuate wounded dogs after a Russian aerial strike hit a stray dog shelter in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, Friday, Feb. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Kateryna Klochko)
People evacuate wounded dogs after a Russian aerial strike hit a stray dog shelter in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, Friday, Feb. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Kateryna Klochko)
People evacuate wounded dogs after a Russian aerial strike hit a stray dog shelter in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, Friday, Feb. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Kateryna Klochko)
People evacuate wounded dogs after a Russian aerial strike hit a stray dog shelter in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, Friday, Feb. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Kateryna Klochko)
With the war about to enter its fifth year later this month following Russia’s all-out invasion of its neighbor, there is no sign of a breakthrough in U.S.-led peace efforts following the latest talks this week. Further U.S.-brokered meetings between Russian and Ukrainian delegations are planned “in the near future, likely in the United States,” Zelenskyy said.
Zelenskyy said Friday he had discussed with his defense minister and the air force commander what new air defense measures Ukraine needs to counter the Russian barrages. He didn’t elaborate on what would be done.
Russia fired 328 drones and seven missiles at Ukraine overnight and in the early morning, the air force said, claiming that air defenses shot down 297 drones.
One person was killed and two others were injured in an overnight Russian attack using drones and powerful glide bombs on the central Dnipropetrovsk region, according to the head of the regional military administration, Oleksandr Hanzha.
A Russian aerial attack on the southern Zaporizhzhia region during early daylight hours injured eight people and damaged 18 apartment blocks, according to regional military administration head Ivan Fedorov.
A dog shelter in the regional capital was also struck, killing 13 dogs, Zaporizhzhia City Council Secretary Rehina Kharchenko said.
Some dogs were rushed to a veterinary clinic, but they could not be saved, she said. Seven other animals were injured and are receiving treatment.
Amid icy conditions in Kyiv, more than 1,200 residential buildings in multiple districts of the capital have had no heating for days due to the Russian bombardment of the power grid, according to Zelenskyy.
The U.K. defense ministry said Friday that Ukraine’s electricity network “is experiencing its most acute crisis of the winter.”
Mykola Tromza, an 81-year-old pensioner in Kyiv, said he has had his power restored, but recently went without heating and water at home for a week.
“I touched my nose and by God, it was like an icicle,” Tromza said. He said he ran up and down to keep warm.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said that air defenses downed 38 Ukrainian drones overnight, including 26 over the Bryansk region.
Bryansk Gov. Alexander Bogomaz said the attack briefly cut power to several villages in the region.
Another Ukrainian nighttime strike damaged power facilities in the Russian city of Belgorod, disrupting electricity distribution, Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov said.
Local reports said that Ukrainian missiles hit a power plant and an electrical substation, cutting power to parts of the city.
Fierce fighting has also continued on the front line despite the frigid temperatures.
Ukraine’s Commander in Chief, Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, said the front line now measures about 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) in length along eastern and southern parts of Ukraine.
The increasing technological improvements to drones on both sides mean that the so-called “kill zone” where troops are in greatest danger is now up to 20 kilometers (12 miles) deep, he told reporters on Thursday in comments embargoed until Friday.
Illia Novikov and Dan Bashakov in Kyiv, Ukraine contributed to this story.
Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
People evacuate wounded dogs after a Russian aerial strike hit a stray dog shelter in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, Friday, Feb. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Kateryna Klochko)
People evacuate wounded dogs after a Russian aerial strike hit a stray dog shelter in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, Friday, Feb. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Kateryna Klochko)
People evacuate wounded dogs after a Russian aerial strike hit a stray dog shelter in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, Friday, Feb. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Kateryna Klochko)
People evacuate wounded dogs after a Russian aerial strike hit a stray dog shelter in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, Friday, Feb. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Kateryna Klochko)
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump used his social media account to share a video about election conspiracy theories that includes a racist depiction of former President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, as primates in a jungle.
The Republican president's Thursday night post immediately drew bipartisan backlash for its treatment of the nation's first Black president and first lady, who are Democrats. It was part of a flurry of social media activity that amplified Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, despite courts around the country and a Trump attorney general from his first term finding no evidence of fraud that could have affected the outcome.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt rejected criticism of the post that depicted the Obamas, who are Democrats. An Obama spokeswoman said the former president had no response.
Nearly all of the 62-second clip, which was among dozens of Truth Social posts from Trump overnight, appears to be from a conservative video alleging deliberate tampering with voting machines in battleground states as the 2020 presidential votes were tallied. At the 60-second mark is a quick scene of two primates, with the Obamas' smiling faces imposed on them.
Those frames were taken from a longer video, previously circulated by an influential conservative meme maker. It shows Trump as “King of the Jungle” and depicts a range of Democratic leaders as animals, including Joe Biden, who is white, as a primate eating a banana.
“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” Leavitt said by text, referring to Disney's 1994 feature film. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
Trump did not comment on the video in his post, which comes in the first week of Black History Month and days after a presidential proclamation that cited “the contributions of black Americans to our national greatness and their enduring commitment to the American principles of liberty, justice, and equality.”
Republican Sen. Tim Scott, who is Black, was among those who criticized Trump's post.
“Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it,” Scott, who chairs Senate Republicans' midterm campaign arm, said on social media.
NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement, “Donald Trump’s video is blatantly racist, disgusting, and utterly despicable.”
Johnson asserted that Trump is trying anything to distract from economic conditions and attention on the Jeffrey Epstein case files.
“You know who isn’t in the Epstein files? Barack Obama,” Johnson said. "You know who actually improved the economy as president? Barack Obama.”
The group Republicans Against Trump, a frequent social media critic of the president, wrote: “There’s no bottom.”
Trump and the official White House social media accounts frequently repost memes and artificial intelligence-generated videos. As Leavitt did Friday, Trump aides typically dismiss critiques and cast the images as humorous.
There is a long history in the U.S. of powerful white figures associating Black people with animals, including apes, in demonstrably false and racist ways. The practice dates back to 18th century cultural racism and pseudo-scientific theories in which white people drew connections between Africans and monkeys to justify the enslavement of Black people in Europe and North America, and later to dehumanize freed Black people as an uncivilized threat to white people.
Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, wrote in his famous text “Notes on the State of Virginia” that Black women were the preferred sexual partners of orangutans. President Dwight Eisenhower, discussing the desegregation of public schools in the 1950s, once argued that white parents were concerned about their daughters being in classrooms with “big Black bucks” Obama, as a candidate and president, was featured as a monkey or other primate on T-shirts and other merchandise.
Trump, for his part, has a record of intensely personal criticism of the Obamas and of using incendiary, sometimes racist, rhetoric.
In his 2024 campaign, Trump said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” language similar to what Adolf Hitler said to dehumanize Jews in Nazi Germany.
During his first White House term, Trump referred to a swath of developing nations that are majority Black as “shithole countries.” He initially denied using the slur but admitted in December 2025 that he did say it.
When Obama was in the White House, Trump advanced the false claims that the 44th president, who was born in Hawaii, was born in Kenya and was constitutionally ineligible to serve. Trump, in interviews that helped endear him to many conservative voters, repeatedly demanded that Obama produce birth records and prove he was a “natural-born citizen” as required to become president.
Obama eventually released his Hawaii records. Trump finally acknowledged during his 2016 campaign, after having won the Republican nomination, that Obama was born in Hawaii. But he immediately said, falsely, that his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton started those birtherism attacks on Obama.
FILE - Former President Barack Obama talks with then President-elect Donald Trump as Melania Trump reads the funeral program before the state funeral for former President Jimmy Carter at Washington National Cathedral in Washington, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
