Russian officials said Ukraine attacked Moscow before dawn on Tuesday with its largest long-range drone bombardment of the war, as both sides stepped up attacks ahead of talks intended to find a way to end three years of fighting.

The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed to have shot down at least 91 drones in the region around Moscow and more than 240 drones directed at other targets across the country.

The Ukrainian military said it had targeted Moscow’s oil refinery, which provides more than a third of the fuel consumed in the capital region, along with an oil production station in the Orel region. Neither claim could be independently verified.

Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, called the attack the largest against the city since the start of the war. At least three people were killed and 18 others were injured in the broader Moscow region, the Russian authorities said, and four international airports temporarily suspended operations. Railway tracks near the Domodedovo airport south of Moscow were also damaged.

President Vladimir V. Putin was briefed on the attack, according to Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman. Mr. Peskov said Russian air defenses were doing “a great job” but told reporters that the authorities “must remain on guard” because attacks would likely continue.

The predawn strikes — just hours before high-level delegations from Kyiv and the United States were scheduled to meet in Saudi Arabia to discuss a possible path toward ending the war — appeared intended to serve as a reminder that despite suffering attacks and enduring huge losses, Ukraine can still hit back at Russia.

Ukraine has proposed an immediate truce in the air, saying it would immediately stop long-range strikes into Russia if Moscow agreed to an equivalent halt. That plan, supported by European nations, including France, is envisioned as a first step in building trust ahead of talks about the overall conflict, in which over a million Ukrainian and Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded.

Ukrainian officials are expected to raise it again in meetings on Tuesday with U.S. officials in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In addition to a partial truce in the air, Ukraine was also expected to press the case for a halt to strikes on the Black Sea to gauge whether Moscow was willing to take any steps to end the fighting.

When asked on Tuesday whether Moscow would agree to such a plan, Mr. Peskov said it was “impossible to talk about positions now” and that Russia expected the American side to inform Moscow about the results of talks with Ukraine.

Kyiv has long maintained that the only way to force Russia to accept an enduring peace deal is through force and by raising the cost of the war for the Kremlin. In recent months, Ukraine has stepped up its attacks on critical infrastructure inside Russia, targeting oil and gas facilities that help fund the Russian war effort.

The timing of the overnight attack on Moscow was meant to drive home that message, according to Andriy Kovalenko, a senior Ukrainian official focused on Russian disinformation operations.

“This is an additional signal to Putin that he should also be interested in a cease-fire from the air,” he said in a statement. “Not only the oil refinery, drones can fly en masse over Moscow.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that Ukraine plans to produce 30,000 long-range strike drones and 3,000 long-range missiles this year, building its domestic arms-making abilities even as U.S. military assistance remains suspended.

Russia has maintained its relentless bombardment of Ukrainian civilian and military institutions. Nearly every night in recent weeks, Russia has launched over 100 drones at targets across Ukraine, including at Kyiv, the capital.

The assaults — which frequently include a combination of ballistic and cruise missiles in an effort to saturate Ukrainian air defenses — persisted overnight Monday and into Tuesday.

Explosions echoed across Kyiv around midnight as air defense teams scrambled. On Tuesday morning, Ukraine’s air force said that Russia had launched 126 drones and one ballistic missile, adding that it shot down or disabled most of the drones as well as the missile.

At least one person was killed when a Russian drone struck a warehouse in Kharkiv and at least 17 others were injured in other attacks across the country, the Ukrainian authorities said. Drones hit the port city of Odesa in southern Ukraine, with the local authorities reporting fires in multiple locations.

Since President Trump spoke by telephone with President Vladimir V. Putin on Feb. 12 — the first official contact between the heads of state for the United States and Russia in years — more than 100 civilians have been killed in Russian strikes, according to data compiled by The New York Times based on reports from the Ukrainian authorities.

The intensifying strikes have been accompanied by shifting dynamics on the front lines, with Russian forces retaking a large part of the territory in Russia’s Kursk region that had been occupied by Ukrainian forces. In a statement on Tuesday, the Russian defense ministry said that its forces had retaken more than 35 square miles of land in the Kursk region. That claim could not be independently verified.

Kyiv had hoped to use its control of that portion of land as leverage in any negotiations to end the war, but the recent developments may have changed that calculus, because the cost of holding the territory could outweigh any diplomatic gain.

More than 125 Ukrainian drones targeted the Kursk region overnight, according to Russia’s defense ministry. That came after the top Ukrainian military commander, Oleksandr Syrsky, said on Monday night that Kyiv was dispatching reinforcements to Kursk — but rejected Russian claims that a large contingent of Ukrainian soldiers there were at risk of encirclement.

“A decision was made to reinforce our group with the necessary forces and resources, including electronic warfare and drones,” he said.

At the same time, there are signs that the Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine has stalled. Russian forces have not advanced in over a week and Ukrainian forces have engaged in limited counterattacks to regain small patches of land, according to Ukrainian soldiers and military analysts who use combat footage to track the daily movements along the front.

Ukraine said it would support a Trump administration proposal for a 30-day cease-fire with Russia, an announcement that followed hours of meetings on Tuesday in Saudi Arabia, where the United States agreed to immediately lift a pause on intelligence sharing with Kyiv and resume military assistance.

The talks in the coastal city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, brought new momentum to cease-fire negotiations that had faltered after a public confrontation at the White House between the Ukrainian and U.S. presidents.

The Trump administration had suspended all military aid and intelligence sharing in the aftermath of that combative meeting in Washington.

The announcements on Tuesday, in a joint statement, came hours after Russian officials said Ukrainian drones had targeted Moscow in the largest attack of the war on the Russian capital.

In the statement, the United States and Ukraine acknowledged that the terms of any cease-fire would be subject to Russia’s approval. There was no immediate comment on the cease-fire discussion from Moscow, which had no officials at the talks.

“Ukraine expressed readiness to accept the U.S. proposal to enact an immediate, interim 30-day cease-fire” if Russia did the same, the statement said. It added, “The United States will communicate to Russia that Russian reciprocity is the key to achieving peace.”

At the conclusion of the meetings, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the agreement now puts the pressure on Russia to end the war.

“We’ll take this offer now to the Russians, and we hope that they’ll say yes, that they’ll say yes to peace,” Mr. Rubio said. “The ball is now in their court.”

The United States has been pursuing talks separately with Russia and Ukraine. There has been no public indication that Russia would accept an unconditional, monthlong cease-fire.

And President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has signaled that he will demand concessions — such as ruling out membership in NATO for Ukraine — before agreeing to any halt in the war, which began in 2022 with the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine and has killed or wounded more than one million soldiers on both sides.

During his annual news conference in December, Mr. Putin suggested that a cease-fire would give Ukrainian forces an opportunity to replenish and train their personnel. “We do not need a truce,” he said. “We need peace, a long-term and lasting peace.”

On Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Trump told reporters that he thought he would speak with Mr. Putin this week and that he hoped a lasting cease-fire would be negotiated in the coming days.

The joint statement on Tuesday said the United States and Ukraine had also agreed to conclude “as soon as possible” a deal to develop Ukraine’s oil, natural gas and mineral resources — an agreement that was put on hold after the Oval Office clash. That deal is intended to “expand Ukraine’s economy and guarantee Ukraine’s long-term prosperity and security,” the statement said.

It added that the United States and Ukraine had also discussed humanitarian relief efforts that would take place during a cease-fire and the exchange of prisoners of war.

“Representatives of both nations praised the bravery of the Ukrainian people in defense of their nation and agreed that now is the time to begin a process toward lasting peace,” the statement said.

The U.S. delegation in Jeddah was led by Mr. Rubio and Michael Waltz, the national security adviser. They met with a delegation from Kyiv led by Andriy Yermak, the Ukrainian president’s chief of staff; Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha; and Defense Minister Rustem Umerov.

Before the talks, Ukraine had insisted that any cease-fire include security guarantees, but there was no indication from the statement issued on Tuesday that any such guarantees would be provided before any interim cease-fire takes effect.

Mr. Waltz told reporters, however, that security guarantees had been part of the conversations in Jeddah.

“We also got into substantive details on how this war is going to permanently end, what type of guarantees they’re going to have for their long-term security and prosperity,” Mr. Waltz said.

The intelligence cutoff had already impaired Ukrainian soldiers in combat, particularly in the Kursk region of Russia, where Russian troops have been rapidly retaking territory seized by Ukraine last summer, according to Ukrainian commanders in the field.

The Russian military said on Tuesday it had retaken 12 settlements from Ukraine in Kursk.

The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington research institute, said that “the temporal correlation” between the suspension of U.S. intelligence sharing with Ukraine and the Russian advances in Kursk was “noteworthy.“

It was unclear from the joint statement whether the cease-fire would cover this pocket of land that Ukraine captured in Kursk.

During the confrontational White House meeting between Mr. Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, which unraveled into an argument and insults, Mr. Trump told Mr. Zelensky at one point: “You’ve talked enough. You won’t win.”

He added at the end of the televised confrontation, “This is going to be great television.”

The fallout has reverberated ever since, prompting Ukraine’s European allies to pledge further support. On Tuesday, Mr. Rubio suggested that it was time to move on from the White House clash.

“What’s back on track here, hopefully, is peace,” ⁦Mr. Rubio said. “This is not ‘Mean Girls.’ This is not some episode of some television show.”

Mr. Yermak, the lead Ukrainian negotiator, thanked the United States for “constructive” talks. “A just peace is the most important for us,” he wrote on social media. “We want a lasting peace.”

In his nightly video address to Ukrainians, Mr. Zelensky said the Ukrainian delegation had entered the talks on Tuesday with an offer for a partial truce, covering only aerial bombardments and combat on the Black Sea.

The American delegation, he said, had proposed the comprehensive cease-fire. Mr. Zelensky said an “important element” in the talks was the U.S. commitment to resume military and intelligence assistance, though he did not directly tie the issue to acceptance of a cease-fire.

Ukraine’s military adviser to the talks, Col. Pavlo Palisa, in a statement posted on Facebook, suggested that the offer to resume U.S. military and intelligence assistance had led to the acceptance of the cease-fire.

It was a suggestion, though not stated directly, that Mr. Trump’s strong-arm negotiating tactic of revoking aid had played a role in achieving the agreement. “We are ready for a full cease-fire,” Colonel Palisa wrote, “and in return the United States agrees to resume security assistance and intelligence sharing.”

Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain called the statement on Tuesday “an important moment for peace in Ukraine” and said he would convene leaders this weekend to discuss next steps.

”I warmly welcome the agreement today in Jeddah and congratulate President Trump and President Zelensky for this remarkable breakthrough,” Mr. Starmer said, adding that “Russia must now agree to a cease-fire and an end to the fighting, too.”

The war in Ukraine has been raging along nearly 700 miles of trenches cut through fields, forests and towns in the country’s east. Longer-range weapons like howitzers and exploding drones have rendered all movement within 10 miles or so of the front lethally dangerous.

The communiqué offered no detail on how a cease-fire could be carried out; past agreements to halt fighting since Russia first intervened militarily in Ukraine in 2014 have proved devilishly complicated.

Reporting was contributed by Marc Santora and Nataliia Novosolova from Kyiv, Ukraine; Yurii Shyvala from Lviv, Ukraine; Anton Troianovski from Berlin; Ivan Nechepurenko from Tbilisi, Georgia; Maggie Haberman from Washington; Aurelien Breeden from Paris; Stephen Castle from London; and Adam Rasgon from Jerusalem.

With anger in Europe mounting over President Trump’s perceived abandonment of the continent, President Emmanuel Macron of France gathered the chiefs of staff of more than 30 armed forces on Tuesday to review the formation of a multinational peacekeeping force to monitor any cease-fire in Ukraine.

A brief statement from the French presidency at the end of meeting said the chiefs of staff reached an agreement that any force dispatched to Ukraine must be credible and conceived for a long-term commitment, must give unfailing support to the Ukrainian army and should not be disconnected from NATO and its “capacities.”

Mr. Macron said “it was the moment for Europe to exert its full weight, for Ukraine and for itself.”

The countries represented at the meeting, convened in partnership with Britain, were mainly European but included Japan, Canada, Turkey and New Zealand. The broad attendance reflected a widespread dismay at Mr. Trump’s “pause” in American military aid to Ukraine and his embrace of the views of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Soon after the meeting, the United States said it would lift the pause on intelligence sharing and resume military assistance to Ukraine.

“I think the moment is important and your presence here sends out a real signal,” Gen. Thierry Burkhard, France’s military chief of staff, told the gathered officials at the start of the meeting, according to footage released by the French military.

There is near unanimity in Europe that Ukraine is its front line against Moscow and that the defense of Ukraine equals the defense of the continent. There has been a sea change. A Europe that was long content to enjoy a post-Cold War peace dividend is now in a bristling mood of rearmament.

“Whatever it takes” were the words this month of Germany’s incoming Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, to describe “the rule for our defense,” given the change in American strategy. It was a powerful declaration of emancipation for a German Republic effectively created and shaped by the United States after World War II.

“Who can believe that the Russia of today will stop at Ukraine?” Mr. Macron asked in a speech to the nation last week. “As I speak, and for years to come, Russia has become a threat to France and to Europe.”

The French defense minister, Sébastien Lecornu, added on Tuesday that the new challenge facing Europe was “not so much the Russian threat as above all the unpredictability of our American partner.”

How and where any European peacekeeping force would deploy in Ukraine is unclear. Any truce, let alone peace agreement, appeared remote as a Ukrainian delegation met United States envoys, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in Saudi Arabia. Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said last month that any such European deployment was “clearly unacceptable.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, convinced that Mr. Putin cannot be trusted, has spoken of the need for a security force of 200,000 troops, but that appears far beyond Europe’s capacity. A deployment in the low tens of thousands seems more plausible, designed to be a credible deterrent, perhaps complemented by an air force contingent to enforce a no-fly zone.

“I would see perhaps 15,000 to 20,000 European troops, enough to deter, but not so large as to be seen by Moscow as a NATO battle corps,” said Camille Grand, a defense expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Brussels. “You will want three lines of defense — first the Ukrainian army, second this European force of reassurance and over the horizon a capacity to reinforce that with air power.”

Mr. Trump waved away serious consideration of security during a televised meeting with Mr. Zelensky at the White House last month that veered into an angry confrontation.

“We’ll make a deal, and when the deal is made, I don’t think we talk about security,” Mr. Trump said, suggesting Mr. Putin could be trusted.

Whether the European force is conceivable, given Russian hostility and the possible lack of American support in critical areas, including intelligence, is an open question. The possibility that such troops would be drawn into the conflict if targeted by Russia, despite Mr. Macron’s pledge that they “would not engage in frontline combat,” is another complicating factor.

Beyond the narrow question of deployment, Europe has embarked with urgency on the quest to build a credible European army, a discussion that will continue Wednesday in Paris among defense ministers from France, Britain, Germany, Italy and Poland. Ukraine’s defense minister will join virtually.

How to fight together, accelerate munitions production and build readiness are core questions. Replacing what the United States provides — including intelligence capabilities, space capabilities, strategic transport and air-to-air refueling — amounts to an immense undertaking.

But the need for a sharp change of direction is acutely felt. Across Europe, mockery of Mr. Trump, combined with anger and astonishment, has steadily spread, even if the president has support among far-right parties and people tired of the domination of liberal elites.

A virulent speech this month by a centrist French senator, Claude Malhuret, has gone viral in Europe and the United States, with millions of views.

“We were at war with a dictator,” Mr. Malhuret said, alluding to Mr. Putin. “Now we are fighting a dictator supported by a traitor.”

He suggested that Mr. Trump had treated Mr. Zelensky like “a stable boy” and described Mr. Trump’s policies as “more than an illiberal drift, a beginning of the confiscation of democracy.”

“Washington has become Nero’s court,” he declared, alluding to the tyrannical Roman emperor, “with an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers and a buffoon on ketamine in charge of purging the civil service.” The “buffoon” was an apparent reference to Elon Musk.

In subsequent interviews, Mr. Malhuret said he had expressed what Americans appeared afraid to say in the growing climate of fear that Mr. Trump’s first weeks in office had provoked. Certainly, he captured sentiments that are propelling Europe toward a military rebirth.