Ukraine Russia war latest: Trump says Putin ‘dragging his feet’ as Moscow appears to delay Black Sea truce

Emergency power outages have been imposed in the Ukrainian port city Mykolaiv after overnight Russian attacks, its mayor said.

Mayor Oleksandr Senkevych said the southern port city was subject to an air raid alert shortly after midnight, then around 2am and 3am, and again at 7.40am local time.

At least seven Shahed drones were destroyed over the region, according to the regional governor Vitaliy Kim.

Russia has refused to return the occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant back to Ukraine, calling Europe’s largest nuclear plant a “Russian facility”.

“The return of the station to Russia’s nuclear sector has been a fait accompli for quite some time,” the Russian foreign ministry said yesterday.

“Transferring the Zaporizhzhia plant to the control of Ukraine or another country is impossible,” it said in a statement.

Russia forcefully captured Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant within days of launching a full-scale military invasion into Ukraine in February 2022 and has since maintained control over the facility, stationing its own staff there.

While Russia illegally declared the region as a whole annexed in the autumn of 2022, its largest city, Zaporizhzhia, remains under Ukrainian control.

The nuclear facility has repeatedly come under drone attacks from both sides and the UN nuclear watchdog has warned against any attacks that could endanger the plant’s reactors.

Last week US president Donald Trump suggested Volodymyr Zelensky consider transferring ownership of Ukraine’s power plants to the US for their own protection.

Ukraine and Russia would likely both prefer prolonging the war over settling for an unfavourable peace deal, according to an unclassified US intelligence assessment.

A report by the US director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has stated that Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky “for now probably still see the risks of a longer war as less than those of an unsatisfying settlement,” reported Bloomberg.

According to the intelligence report published yesterday, both leaders likely understand the risks of a prolonged war and impacts like continued economic disruptions for Moscow under the pressure of sanctions that could harm Russia, including through “undesired escalation with the West”.

A protracted war would also impact Kyiv’s standing on the battlefield, as well as potentially its future negotiating position, the assessment said.

Russia’s defence ministry says its forces destroyed at least nine Ukrainian drones overnight, including two over the waters of the Black Sea.

The statement comes just hours after the US said it had struck deals with Ukraine and Russia to pause their attacks over the Black Sea region and against each other’s energy facilities.

The officials did not mention when the Black Sea deals would come into effect.

It was not immediately clear how many drones were launched over Russia overnight and there were no immediate reports of hits on Black Sea or energy targets.

Russian forces continued to fight on several points on the Ukrainian frontline but did not advance in the past 24 hours, according to the US-based think tank The Institute for the Study of War.

In its main war effort in eastern Ukraine, Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Kharkiv direction yesterday by conducting ground attacks northeast of the city, the ISW said in its latest assessment.

Russia also continued offensive operations in the Kupiansk direction, east of Kupiansk near Petropavlivka; and southeast of Kupiansk near Stepova Novoselivka, but did not make confirmed advances.

In Donetsk, Russian forces conducted offensive operations northeast of Siversk near Hryhorivka and Bilohorivka, east of Siversk near Verkhnokamyanske, and southeast of Siversk near Ivano-Daryivka in the past 48 hours.

The Russian defence ministry claimed yesterday that its forces have seized Myrne, northeast of Lyman, though there has been no confirmation from Ukraine.

Russia’s new ambassador to the United States Alexander Darchiev will leave for his post in Washington today, Russia’s state-run TASS news agency reported, citing unnamed diplomatic sources.

Russian president Vladimir Putin appointed Mr Darchiev, a veteran diplomat known in the past for public denunciations of the West, as ambassador to the United States on 6 March.

Russia has had no ambassador in Washington since last October when the previous envoy, Anatoly Antonov, left his post.

Ukraine’s delegation in Saudi Arabia has not fully agreed to the idea of lifting sanctions as a condition for a maritime ceasefire, a Ukrainian government source told AP, arguing that Russia has done nothing to warrant having the financial penalties rolled back.

The official has also confirmed Kyiv’s objection to the exclusion of European countries from the sanctions discussions, despite most of them being within the European Union’s responsibility.

Ukrainian defence minister Rustem Umerov warned that Kyiv would see the deployment of Russian warships in the western Black Sea as a “violation of the commitment to ensure safe navigation” there and “a threat to the national security of Ukraine”.

“In this case, Ukraine will have full right to exercise right to self-defence,” he said.

Moscow is now open to the revival of the Black Sea shipping deal but warned that its interests must be protected, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has said.

“We want the grain and fertiliser market to be predictable, so that no one tries to ‘ward us off’ from it,” Mr Lavrov told the Russian state Channel One television.

“Not only because we want… to make a legitimate profit in fair competition, but also because we are concerned about the food security situation in Africa and other countries of the Global South,” he said.

But the Kremlin warned that the Black Sea deal could only be implemented after sanctions against the Russian Agricultural Bank and other financial organisations involved in food and fertiliser trade are lifted and their access to the SWIFT system of international payments is ensured.

The deal brokered by the US, which the Trump administration says has been agreed to in principle by both sides of the war, emphasises that inspections of commercial ships would be necessary to ensure they aren’t used for military purposes.

The White House, in an apparent reference to Moscow’s demands, said that the US “will help restore Russia’s access to the world market for agricultural and fertiliser exports, lower maritime insurance costs and enhance access to ports and payment systems for such transactions”.

British troops sent to Ukraine as part of a planned peacekeeping force could face “lawfare” under human rights legislation, Tory MPs have warned.

They called on the defence secretary to create an exemption from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) for any soldiers sent to the region.

Our Whitehall editor Kate Devlin reports:

Donald Trump has said he thought Russia wanted to end its war against Ukraine but acknowledged that Moscow was not offering swift progress on that front.

“I think that Russia wants to see an end to it, but it could be they’re dragging their feet. I’ve done it over the years,” he said in an interview with Newsmax last night.

Separately, he told reporters that “we are making a lot of progress” in peace talks while adding that there was “tremendous animosity” in the talks.

“There’s a lot of hatred, as you can probably tell, and it allows for people to get together, mediated, arbitrated, and see if we can get it stopped. And I think it will work,” Mr Trump said.