Ukraine-Russia war latest: Kremlin claims Black Sea ceasefire still possible after launching fresh drone attack

Russia launched 139 drones and an Iskander-M ballistic missile during an overnight attack, the Ukrainian air force said this morning.

The air force shot down 78 drones and 34 more did not reach their targets, it added in a statement on Telegram.

The air force did not say what happened to the remaining 27 drones or the missile.

Over the past day, one person was killed and at least 117 injured in an overnight attacks on Ukraine, local authorities said according to the Kyiv Independent.

Although Starmer and Emmanuel Macron have tried to herd the European Nato members into backing a ceasefire line monitoring force, potential big players like Italy and Spain have rejected it. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni has no desire to break with Trump, whose domestic “anti-woke” agenda mirrors her own culture war in Italy, while Spain’s Pedro Sanchez runs a country that is far from the Russo-Ukrainian front line, and has a strong left-of-centre pacifist tradition.

Not only are America’s European allies splitting from Trump’s Washington: they are divided among themselves. They might be united in deploring Russian aggression and Trump’s appeasement-style approach to mediation, but their disunity over what to do about it confirms the US administration’s belief that making big deals with authoritarians like Putin, or the Saudi hosts of the Ukraine talks is the way to go, rather than trying to keep an army of squabbling “allies” in line.

Allies who don’t contribute much – even when they can agree on policy – can be ignored completely.

A new deal on Black Sea shipping is possible but with strict conditions attached, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has said following talks between Washington and Moscow.

The US hopes to push through a ceasefire in the Black Sea as part of its intense round of diplomacy in Saudi Arabia, where a White House delegation is meeting with its counterparts from Ukraine and Russia.

Lavrov has said an agreement, which US negotiators hope would guarantee the security of shipping lanes in the Black Sea, would need to have strict conditions attached to it.

Russia wants to inspect ships to ensure empty ships were not used for weapons deliveries, he said. Other issues relating to the export of Russian grain and fertilisers have posed serious problems in the past, Lavrov added.

The CEO of Ryanair has hit out at Ukrainian airports after the airline’s proposals for reopening airspace to commercial flights was met with “radio silence”.

Restarting flights will be central to rebuilding Ukraine’s economy, Michael O’Leary told a Kyiv conference organised by ‘We Build Ukraine’, according to the Kyiv Independent.

Ukraine’s skies have been closed to commercial flights since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

In summer 2023, Ryanair submitted a proposal to airports in thw western city of Lviv and Boryspil near Kyiv to “deliver 5 million passengers to Ukraine within the first year of the skies reopening”, Mr O’Leary said.

“But disappointingly, we haven’t heard back from them for over two years,” the CEO added.

“I am somewhat at a loss to understand why the airports are not getting ready for the resumption of flights and why the airports are not doing the agreement with Ryanair.”

When you imagine receiving the news that you’re on the kill list of one of the world’s cruellest dictators, you perhaps don’t imagine it while holding a glass of champagne. But, in January 2023, that’s exactly – or, almost exactly – what happened to Christo Grozev, an internationally renowned investigative journalist who I had been filming for a documentary about his work for months, and who told me at a glitzy awards ceremony in New York that Vladimir Putin wanted him dead.

The Bulgarian-born journalist had long been rustling feathers at the Kremlin – his exceptional work for Bellingcat (a Netherlands-based investigative journalism group that Grozev headed up from 2015) exposed Putin’s killing network of spies and assassins.

Investigative journalist James Jones writes:

Moscow has accused the Ukrainian military of deliberately targeting a group of Russian journalists working in Russian-controlled eastern Ukraine.

Alexander Fedorchak, a war correspondent from Russia’s Izvestia media outlet, camera operator Andrei Panov and driver Alexander Sirkeli who worked for the Zvezda television channel, were all killed according to the Russian foreign ministry.

The reports have not been independently verified.

“The (artillery) fire was targeted. They were deliberately targeted to kill them. The Kyiv regime continues its atrocities against journalists and people who do not have weapons in their hands,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

As we reported, officials from Washington and Kyiv have been engaged in a second round of talks in Saudi Arabia this morning, after first meeting on Sunday night.

These talks have now concluded, Ukrainian media reports.

Discussions appear to have lasted little over an hour, following the mammoth 12-hour talks between US and Russian delegations on Monday.

For the past few weeks, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has been scrambling to rebuild ties with the White House after the infamous Oval Office clash with Donald Trump.

But Mr Zelensky, it turns out, made one mistake which could have altered the entire course of the visit.

The wartime leader had brought with him a gift – the championship belt of Ukrainian heavyweight boxer Oleksandr Usyk. Taking his seat next to Mr Trump in the Oval Office, he placed the belt on a side table.

He had initially planned to reach over and hand the belt to Mr Trump in front of the journalists, according to an in-depth interview with Time.

Instead, the president picked up a folder containing gruesome photographs of the victims of the war in Ukraine, a move which US officials say the meeting started going in the wrong direction.

“He has family, loved ones, children. He has to feel the things that every person feels,” Zelensky told the magazine. “What I wanted to show were my values. But then, well, the conversation went in another direction.”