Hours after the strike on the embattled city of Kramatorsk tore through two buses on Thursday, Zelenskiy criticised Washington's effort to pursue economic ties with Russia while also seeking to mediate the more than four-year war.
City authorities reported a new drone attack in the evening that killed two people, brining to 35 the city's total death toll.
Local authorities reported that a Russian guided aerial bomb killed two people in a village in southeastern Dnipropetrovsk and one person died in the western city of Ivano-Frankivsk.
The attacks were launched a day after a mass Russian drone and missile assault killed dozens across Ukraine - 22 of them in a residential building in the central town of Pryluky, about 130km east of Kyiv.
Speaking in the early evening, Zelenskiy said 78 people were killed and 215 wounded by strikes in the last two days across Ukraine.
Speaking to reporters in Pryluky, the Ukrainian leader urged the US to accede to his requests to expand Ukraine's access to the Starlink satellite service to help it target Russian ballistic-missile launchers.
"Open Starlink for Ukraine. You did open it when you were responding to Iran ... I've said quite openly - give it to us, help us defend our skies and dominate there. And then Putin will sit down at the negotiating table," he said in an emotional statement.
Ukraine has in recent months aimed to wrest the battlefield initiative from Russia, whose gains have slowed in 2026, but is still suffering from Moscow's increasingly brutal air war.
"So where's the truth here, where's the honesty? Where's the stalemate? ... That's called unwillingness," he said, referring to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio's assertion earlier on Thursday the war was at a stalemate and the United States would keep working towards a settlement.
"One cannot, on the one hand, negotiate with the Russians about future economic projects, whilst on the other hand say that we find ourselves in some sort of ... diplomatic stalemate," Zelenskiy said.
Top Russian and US officials, including US special envoy Jared Kushner, had held talks about bringing a US investor into the Nord Stream pipelines that delivered Russian gas to Germany before Moscow invaded Ukraine, Reuters reported on Thursday.
Ukrainian negotiators would travel to the US on Friday and Saturday for talks, Zelenskiy said, urging US President Donald Trump to increase sanction pressure on Russia.
Zelenskiy told reporters in Kyiv that he expected Kyiv's European partners to join the talks with the US.
He also said Ukrainian negotiators would raise the issue of air defences in light of near-constant Russian attacks.
Twenty people were wounded in the Kramatorsk strike - one of the biggest single attacks of 2026 by Russia.
Moscow denies targeting civilians but regularly pounds cities with missiles and drones.
"The Russians are deliberately targeting civilians. For them, a bus full of passengers is an attractive target precisely because a single strike can kill as many people as possible," regional governor Vadym Filashkin said on the Telegram app.
Some bodies had not been identified yet, Zelenskiy said, adding that the Kramatorsk attack would not go unanswered.
Separately, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said four people were killed and 19 wounded in morning attacks on the Ukrainian capital Kyiv.
Water and electricity supplies were subject to interruptions which officials said would take time to put right.
Russia has unleashed relentless drone strikes against Kyiv in recent weeks, targeting warehouses, data centres and renewing its campaign against Ukraine's power grid before winter.
