Ukraine-Russia war latest: Trump threatens to abandon peace talks while Putin launches overnight drone attack

US vice president JD Vance has met the Vatican’s number two official after Cardinal Pietro Parolin urged that no peace deal be “imposed” on Ukraine.

Mr Vance, a Catholic convert, arrived in Vatican City on Saturday for an appointment with secretary of state Mr Parolin and foreign minister Archbishop Paul Gallagher.

The Holy See has responded cautiously to the Trump administration, in keeping with its tradition of diplomatic neutrality, although it has continued to insist on a peaceful resolution to the war in Ukraine.

“It is clear that the approach of the current US administration is very different from what we are used to and, especially in the West, from what we have relied on for many years,” Mr Parolin told La Repubblica on the eve of Mr Vance’s visit.

As the US pushes to end the war in Ukraine, Mr Parolin reaffirmed Kyiv’s right to its territorial integrity and insisted that any peace deal must not be “imposed” on Ukraine but “is built patiently, day by day, with dialogue and mutual respect”.

Mr Vance was spending Easter weekend in Rome with his family and attended Good Friday services in St Peter’s Basilica after meeting with Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni.

Russia’s Defence Ministry on Saturday accused Ukraine of attacking Russian energy facilities 10 times over the past 24 hours.

The US brokered a 30-day moratorium in March between Ukraine and Russia against strikes on each other’s energy infrastructure. Both sides have repeatedly accused the other of violating it.

On Friday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, when asked if the energy moratorium was over, said it had already been a month but that no orders from the president had been received to change Russia’s position.

Mr Rubio’s threats came at the start of the Easter weekend, after Russia’s latest attack on Ukraine left one person dead and 98 injured in Kharkiv on Friday morning. US officials said last month that the US president hoped to secure a ceasefire agreement by 20 April, a symbolic date on which Western and Orthodox celebrations of Easter will overlap this year – and one that is fast approaching, with no deal currently in close sight.

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Russia’s Defence Ministry said on Saturday that its troops had taken control of the village of Shevchenko in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.

The battlefield report could not be independently verified.

During his campaign, Donald Trump said repeatedly that he would be able to end the war between Russia and Ukraine “in 24 hours” upon taking office. He has changed his tone since becoming president again.

As various US emissaries have held talks looking for an end to the war, both Trump and his top officials have become more reserved about the prospects of a peace deal. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday suggested the US might soon back away from negotiations altogether without more progress, adding a comment that sounded like a repudiation of the president’s old comments.

“No one’s saying this can be done in 12 hours,” he told reporters.

The promises made by presidential candidates are often felled by the realities of governing. But Mr Trump’s shift is noteworthy given his prior term as president and his long histories with both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Russian troops recaptured the village of Oleshnya in Russia’s western Kursk region from Ukrainian forces, the RIA state news agency cited the Russian defence ministry as saying on Saturday.

The battlefield report could not be independently verified.

Russia has been fighting to eject Ukrainian troops from Kursk since Kyiv sent its forces across the border in a lightning incursion in August 2024.

Painful as it is to recall at this juncture, it was not so very long ago that Donald Trump – as candidate and then as president-elect – bragged that he could end the war in Ukraine “in a day” – or, just to emphasise the spurious precision and seriousness of his outlandish claim, “within 24 hours”. Perhaps the president was speaking figuratively, after all.

Since he took power almost 100 days ago, it is fair to say that progress has been slow, and that what little has been achieved by the various rounds of peace talks – often with Ukraine cruelly absent – has not been sustained.

Even Mr Trump has declared himself “very angry” and “pissed off” at the delays, which have usually been caused by Russia playing for time in a fairly blatant manner. Yet that was a month ago, and even a threat (which turned out to be empty) to sanction Russia’s oil export trade failed to push Moscow along the path towards peace.

Russia launched 8 missiles and nearly 90 drones, damaging infrastructure in five regions across Ukraine on Friday night.

More than a third of the drones were shot down, and another 36 were redirected by electronic warfare, the Ukrainian air force said.

It remains unclear how many people were injured in the attack.

“During the night of April 19, 2025 (from 9:00 p.m. Kyiv time on April 18), the Russian occupiers carried out a strike on Ukraine with ground- and air-launched missiles and attack UAVs,” the air force said in a statement.

Damage has been recorded in five of Ukraine’s regions in the south, northeast and east, it said.

However, the air force did not reveal details regarding the fate of the missiles.

The statement noted that the eight missiles included three Iskander ballistic missiles as well as anti-ship missiles suspected to be launched from the Crimean region.

A St. Petersburg court sentenced a 19-year-old Russian activist for nearly three months on Friday after she affixed a quote from a Ukrainian poem onto a monument.

Darya Kozyreva was sentenced to two years and eight months in a penal colony for “discrediting” the Russian army after she affixed a verse from a Ukrainian poet. Taras Shevchenko’s “My Testament” to his statue in St Petersburg.

The quote she pasted reads: “Oh bury me, then rise ye up. And break your heavy chains. And water with the tyrants’ blood. The freedom you have gained” (translation by John Weir).

She was arrested in February 2024 and has spent over a year in pre-trial detention, according to local news sources.

In her defiant final statement at the court, Ms Kozyreva said: “I still dream that Ukraine will reclaim every inch of its territory: Donbas, Crimea, all of it. And I believe that one day, it will. History will judge, and judge fairly. But Ukraine has already won. It has won. That’s all.”