Ukraine war latest: negotiations ‘near completion’

The death toll from a Ukrainian attack on the Kursk region of Russia has risen to five, the governor has said.

Alexander Khinshtein had previously said that three people were killed by strikes on a shopping centre on Monday evening.

Robert Wilkie, a lawyer who ran President Trump’s military transition team, has defended his administration against claims it is too close to Putin. He described its position as “definitely not a pro-Russian”.

He told Times Radio: “Some in Europe have forgotten the effects of the first Trump administration, with sanctions on Russian banks, sanctions on Russian sales of oil and the fact that President Trump ordered the deaths of 300 Russian soldiers in the Syrian desert when they refused to remove themselves from the vicinity of American soldiers.”

He added: “European nations have prospered for too long under the protection of the American eagle and it is time that they provide for their own defence.”

A ceasefire “never seemed closer”but peace would “not come through diplomatic gestures alone”, President Zelensky’s chief of staff has said.

Andriy Yermak said it was vital to put “political and financial pressure on Russia to raise the cost of renewed conflict”.

“First, Ukraine must be given security guarantees that lend credibility to a future ceasefire agreement,” he wrote in The Guardian. “Second, Europe must act decisively to strengthen and increase the sanctions against Russia. And third, Europe should take control of the frozen Russian assets to enable continued and increased support for Ukraine.”

It is a “sign of hope” that negotiations in Saudi Arabia have run on for several hours, according to Yuriy Sak, an adviser in Ukraine’s Ministry of Strategic Industries.

Ukrainian officials had travelled to Jeddah “in the hopes that this will bring us closer to ending the war”, he said, telling the BBC it demonstrated “to our American partners we are serious”.

Hungary’s foreign minister said that crude oil shipment via the Druzhba pipeline had been suspended after Ukraine claimed to have struck oil refineries in Russia overnight that service the pipeline.

“I have just talked to the deputy energy minister of Russia who told me that due to the attack shipments are not possible now but works are underway,” Peter Szijjarto said.

Hungary imports most of its crude oil via the Druzhba pipeline, which transports Russian crude through Belarus and Ukraine to Hungary and Slovakia.

Mike Waltz, the US national security adviser, has said negotiations with Ukraine are “nearing completion”, Ukrainian news media reports.

As talks in Saudi Arabia near their sixth hour, officials are believed to be taking a short break.

Poland will purchase an additional 5,000 Starlink terminals, according to its minister for digitalisation, to help fortify Ukraine’s internet access.

Over the weekend, Elon Musk said that Ukraine’s “entire front line” would collapse if he turned his Starlink satellite system off. Poland’s foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski replied that his country paid for Starlink’s use in Ukraine, with Musk then calling him a “small man” who should “say thank you”.

There had been fears Musk, a close Trump ally, would refuse Ukraine access to Starlink after Washington paused intelligence sharing with Kyiv. Musk responded to the concerns and said: “No one has made any threats about cutting Ukraine off from Starlink.”

Peace will only be achieved through the demilitarisation of Ukraine and “elimination of the Zelensky regime”, a Kremlin-friendly Russian opposition leader has said.

Sergei Mironov, leader of the Just Russia party, added: “The only force capable of achieving sustainable peace is the Russian army. It makes sense to stop a special military operation now only if the Kyiv regime surrenders.”

Having twice run against Putin in presidential elections, Mironov, 72, has become one of the most zealous supporters of the war in Ukraine. A BBC investigation found that in 2022 he and his wife had adopted a ten-month-old Ukrainian girl who was abducted from the town of Kherson during Russian occupation.

Sergey Lavrov, the Russia’s foreign minister, said that initiatives to install peacekeepers in Ukraine after a potential ceasefire deal was an attempt to save the Ukrainian government from the “wrath of the people”.

Poland will seek to offer military training to 100,000 civilians per year beginning in 2027, Donald Tusk, the prime minister of Poland, said.

Outlining the scheme to expand the country’s army reserves, first announced on Friday, Tusk told reporters today: “Anyone who is interested and is between 18 and 60 will receive detailed information on how to complete the training course.” The programme will be voluntary, he added, but the government hopes to maximise participation by offering “motivations and incentives”.

Poland, which shares a border with the Russian exclave Kaliningrad, has been heavily arming itself amid pressure from President Trump for Europe to take more responsibility for its own defence.

Elon Musk called Mark Kelly, a senator, a “traitor” after he visited Ukraine.

Kelly, a former Nasa astronaut who had reportedly been a front runner to be Kamala Harris’s running mate last year, posted on X: “Just left Ukraine. What I saw proved to me we can’t give up on the Ukrainian people. Everyone wants this war to end, but any agreement has to protect Ukraine’s security and can’t be a giveaway to Putin.”

“You are a traitor,” Musk replied. The senator from Arizona hit back: “Elon, if you don’t understand that defending freedom is a basic tenet of what makes America great and keeps us safe, maybe you should leave it to those of us who do.”

Russians living near buildings struck by drones have reacted to the overnight attacks. A pensioner named Tatyana asked: “How can this happen in Moscow? What about our air defences? We need to do something. But what?”

A man called Mikhail interjected, saying “put more pressure on the scum,” referring to the Ukrainian army.

“No, this should be decided on a political level,” Tatyana told the BBC. “Not politicians,” Mikhail said, “but our army.”

Despite increasingly tense relations between US and Ukrainian leaders since a calamitous meeting in the White House a few weeks ago, President Zelensky’s popularity at home has been given a boost, according to the most recent opinion polls.

Zelensky’s approval rating now stands at 68 per cent, according to the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, pushing his net approval rating up from 20 to 38 per cent. Before the diplomatic spat, 57 per cent approved of the president.

Despite being overwhelmingly popular among Ukrainians immediately after Russia’s full-scale invasion, as the war went on Zelensky’s polling numbers were dragged down by issues including a flagging economy, corruption allegations linked to government ministers and controversies over conscription.

Oil facilities in Russia’s Moscow and Oryol regions were among the targets struck during a large-scale drone attack overnight, Ukraine’s general staff said in a statement.

According to Russian officials, the attacks killed at least three people and caused a short shutdown at the capital’s four airports.

Britain must immediately spend billions of pounds on drones, shells and armoured vehicles to ready the country for war, ministers have been warned.

Sir Keir Starmer’s strategic defence review will set out plans to modernise the army, navy and RAF over the next decade. The prime minister has promised to increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027, equating to £6 billion a year of extra investment.

However, President Trump’s ambivalent remarks about Nato’s Article 5 — which states that members will come to the defence of an ally which comes under attack — have raised concerns in Whitehall about the timeline for Britain’s rearmament.

• Read in full: Drones, shells and armoured vehicles must be bought off the shelf

The UN human rights office has received termination notices from Washington for five of its projects, including its work in Ukraine.

Ravina Shamdasani, the UN human rights spokesperson, said that the notices were also for projects in Equatorial Guinea, Iraq and Colombia.

With the help of Elon Musk, President Trump is cutting billions of dollars in foreign aid programmes as part of a major spending overhaul.

Steve Witkoff, a key adviser to President Trump, appears not to be present at talks between US and Ukrainian officials currently underway in Saudi Arabia.

Witkoff had been expected in Jeddah, but seems instead to be being used as a main channel of communication between the US and Russia after Bloomberg reported he will travel to Moscow later this week for his second meeting with President Putin in two months.

As the president’s long-term friend and golfing partner, Witkoff has emerged as a decisive negotiator in Trump’s administration, with his duties expanding well beyond his official brief of US Middle East envoy.

Witkoff participated in the first high-level discussions in February between Russia and the US since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, while Keith Kellogg, Trump’s Russia-Ukraine envoy, was notably absent. There has been no Ukrainian reaction yet to the significance of Witkoff skipping the talks in Saudi Arabia.

Germany’s military still has “too little of everything”, despite a costly overhaul that was launched after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

“A lot has been improved and a lot has been achieved, but we are still not there and there is still a lot to do,” Eva Hoegl, Germany’s parliamentary commissioner for the armed forces, told reporters on Tuesday.

Hoegl said that despite a recruitment drive personnel numbers in the armed forces had dipped to 181,200 in 2024 from 181,540 in 2023.

Germany met the Nato defence spending target of 2 per cent of gross domestic product for the first time in 2024, but about 82 per cent of a €100 billion special defence fund agreed in 2022 to overhaul the Bundeswehr has already been spent, according to the report.

President Putin has no intention to compromise and has deliberately made “maximalist” demands ahead of negotiations with Ukraine, which he knows Kyiv and European leaders will find unacceptable, security officials have told Bloomberg.

Their comments cast doubt on whether Russia is prepared to commit to serious peace negotiations.

Yesterday, the US secretary of state Marco Rubio said it was Ukraine that would have to make concessions ahead of today’s talks in Jeddah, saying it must be “prepared to do difficult things”.

A video of Claude Malhuret, a French lawmaker, has been viewed millions of times on social media after he told the Senate that Washington had become “Nero’s court with an incendiary emperor” and described Elon Musk as a “buffoon on ketamine in charge of purging the civil service”.

Malhuret has now told AFP that “Americans today feel that their politicians are unable to stand up to Trump”.

“The Republicans, of course, are afraid of reprisals and so are saying nothing, even those who disagree with him,” he said. “And the Democrats are still reeling from their presidential defeat and the party is not yet in working order.

“For my part, many of the messages I received asked: ‘How come it has to be a French politician who says this, when no one there is saying it?’”

A third person has died after a Ukrainian drone attack on the Moscow region, Evgeniya Khrustaleva, the head of the town of Domodedovo, said on Tuesday.

Ukraine launched its biggest ever drone attack on Moscow overnight, killing at least two workers at a meat warehouse, injuring 18 others and causing a short shutdown at the Russian capital’s four airports, officials said.

American officials meeting with their Ukrainian counterparts will “find out the extent to which Kyiv is ready for peace”, the Kremlin has said in the aftermath of a large-scale drone attack on Moscow.

Responding to a question about Russia’s position in any future ceasefire talks, Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, said it was “absolutely impossible” to discuss positions now.

“Today only the Americans will find out, as they themselves say, to what extent Ukraine is ready for peace. Therefore it would be very foolish to discuss parts of the settlement plans now,” he said.

While talks are underway in Jeddah, dozens of military chiefs are due in Paris today to discuss potential peacekeeping forces in Ukraine.

Military officials from some 30 European and Nato countries — including the UK, France, Germany and Poland — are expected to discuss practicalities for a potential future peace operation along with Asian and Oceania nations. It is a sign of how far Sir Keir Starmer and President Macron are casting their net in order to build what the prime minister has described as “a coalition of the willing”.

On Saturday, Starmer will convene leaders of about 20 nations virtually.

Russian special forces have crept through a gas pipeline to attack Ukrainian units fighting in the Kursk region as Moscow seeks to recapture parts of its border province, “no matter the cost”, before ceasefire negotiations begin.

According to Ukrainian officials and military bloggers, the troops walked about 15km inside the pipeline, which Moscow had until recently used to send Russian gas to Europe. Some had spent several days in the pipe before striking Ukrainian units from the rear near the town of Sudzha.

Russian Telegram channels showed photographs of what were said to be special forces operatives wearing gas masks and moving along what looked like the inside of a large pipe.

• Read in full: Special forces soldiers walked 15km inside the disused pipes

Emergency services raced to contain a large fire in Odesa following a Russian drone attack last night.

“The enemy has once again conducted a large-scale drone attack on Odesa. A house, a warehouse containing children’s toys and a fuel tank caught fire as a result of the attack,” Oleh Kiper, the governor of the region, said.

Seven houses in the Kyiv region were damaged due to falling debris after Russian missiles were shot down, local authorities said.

Ukraine’s air force said that they had shot down a Russian Iskander ballistic missile and 79 drones overnight.

Andriy Yermak, the head of Ukraine‘s presidential office, has shared footage on X of Ukrainian officials walking into a meeting room to begin discussions with the US secretary of state Marco Rubio and the national security adviser Mike Waltz.

Posting on X in Ukrainian, he said that talks in Saudi Arabia had “started constructively”.

Two people have died and at least 20 injured in a “massive” drone attack on Moscow, the city’s governor has said.

A 38-year-old security guard for Miratorg, a meat production company, died after being struck by debris from a downed drone in a car park in Domodedovo, an area south of Moscow.

Another Miratorg security guard, a 50-year-old man, died in hospital from head injuries. Both men were working on a night shift when the attack came in the early hours of the morning, Andrei Vorobyov, the Moscow region governor said. He promised to pay one million roubles (£9,000) to the families of those killed.

Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, said that Ukraine will have to give up land seized by Russia as part of any peace deal as he flew to Saudi Arabia for make-or-break talks.

President Zelensky of Ukraine arrived in Jeddah on Monday before talks aimed at reviving Kyiv’s fractured relationship with Washington and persuading President Trump of a means to end the war with Russia without Ukraine’s all-out surrender.

At high-level talks in the Saudi coastal city on Tuesday, Ukraine is expected to lay out its proposal for a sea and air truce as an opening gambit in its pursuit of an equitable peace with Russia. In a post on X, Zelensky said that Ukraine’s position in the talks would be “fully constructive” and he hoped for “practical outcomes” on ending the war.

• Read in full: US secretary of state tells Zelensky he will have to let go of land seized by Russia

Russia should retaliate to Ukraine’s drone attack with an intermediate-range ballistic missile strike, the head of the Russian parliament defence committee has said.

Andrei Kartapolov called for the use of Oreshnik missiles, a newly developed Russian weapon capable of carrying multiple warheads and travelling at hypersonic speeds. It was first used to strike the Ukrainian city of Dnipro in November 2024 and is not thought to have been deployed since.

“The decision is up to the supreme commander-in-chief, but I think it would be a good idea to launch an Oreshnik, preferably more than one,” Kartapolov said on Telegram.

He called Ukraine’s drone attack “a pure propaganda move”. “They are showing that they are ‘cool’, that they can do something. So they need to be destroyed and put in order — nothing more,” Kartapolov concluded.

President Zelensky and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman have issued a joint statement following their meeting yesterday.

The leaders said they discussed efforts to achieve “sustainable fair, and comprehensive” peace in Ukraine.

Russia’s ministry of defence claims to have captured 12 settlements in the Kursk region.

“During offensive operations 12 population points were liberated,” the ministry of defence announced on their telegram channel. They also claimed they had seized 100 square kilometres of the region.

The ministry calculated that they had killed 270 Ukrainian soldiers in the past 24 hours, destroyed two Ukrainian tanks and two US-made Paladin artillery systems and several armoured vehicles.

The announcement followed Oleksandr Syrsky, the head of Ukraine’s army, last night stating that Ukraine had inflicted “heavy personnel and equipment losses” on Russian forces in the area.

• Read in full: Russia moves towards ‘encircling Ukrainian forces in Kursk’

Andrey Kartapolov, the Russian chairman of the Duma’s defence committee, said Ukraine’s overnight drone strikes were an attempt by Kyiv to show the American public “that it can still do something”.

He told Russian media the attack was linked to negotiations currently underway in Saudi Arabia.

The meeting in Jeddah between US and Ukrainian officials has now begun, according to Ukraine’s foreign ministry.

Russia’s claim to have shot down 337 Ukrainian drones would mark the largest single drone attack from either side of the war if confirmed.

The biggest attack until now came two weeks ago, when Russia launched 267 attack drones against various targets across Ukraine on the eve of the third anniversary of the full-scale invasion. Two people in Kherson were reportedly killed in the attacks.

While the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv is regularly targeted by massive Russian drone and missile strikes, attacks on Moscow are much less frequent.

The largest previous Ukrainian attack on Russia was last November when Russia said that it had downed a total of 70 drones in over six regions, including 34 over Moscow.

Kyiv said the overnight drone attack on Moscow should encourage President Putin to accept an aerial ceasefire proposed by Ukraine.

“The largest drone attack in history was carried out on Moscow and the Moscow region,” said Andriy Kovalenko, a national security council official responsible for countering disinformation, adding: “This is an additional signal to Putin that he should also be interested in a ceasefire in the air.”

Ukrainian officials are expected to outline plans for an air and sea truce with Russia during talks today in Saudi Arabia. President Zelensky previously said such a truce would act as an initial test, to see how committed Moscow is to ending their war on Ukraine.

The Ukrainian negotiators who will sit down with their US counterparts in Jeddah today will be aiming to regain the initiative after the surprise launch last month of direct talks between Washington and Moscow over ending the war in Ukraine.

Ukraine was thrown onto the back foot when President Trump announced that he had opened negotiations with President Putin and the two sides met in Saudi Arabia, leaving President Zelensky out in the cold.

Zelensky refused to swiftly sign an agreement exchanging Ukraine’s mineral wealth for US investment, and his trip to Washington to renegotiate it ended in disaster, in front of television cameras in the White House, after a fiery exchange with JD Vance, the vice-president.

• Read in full: Key talks between Ukrainian officials and the US in Jeddah

Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East envoy, is planning to meet President Putin in Moscow later this week, according to Bloomberg.

Witkoff had been expected to join talks with Ukrainian officials in Jeddah today, although his attendance is now uncertain.

As Trump’s longstanding friend, Witkoff had his brief broadened after playing a key role in getting a ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel over the line and flying to Moscow in mid-February where he met with Putin and secured a prisoner swap with Russia.

Russian forces attacked Ukraine with a ballistic missile and 126 drones overnight, setting a fuel storage facility on fire and injuring at least two people in different parts of the country, Ukrainian officials said.

The Ukrainian air force said that it shot down the ballistic Iskander-M missile and 79 of the drones, while another 35 drones did not reach their targets likely due to electronic warfare countermeasures.

The Kremlin has cautioned Russians not to view America’s refusal to give full-fledged support to Ukraine through “rose-coloured spectacles”.

Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said that even with the US pausing military aid deliveries to Ukraine, it would be many months before Kyiv’s stockpiles would be depleted.

He also accused the west of waging a proxy war against Russia.

China has said it expects a “just and lasting solution” between Russia and Ukraine can be found as delegates from Kyiv and Washington prepare to meet in Saudi Arabia.

“We expect and hope that parties can reach a just and lasting solution that is acceptable to all sides,” Mao Ning, the foreign ministry spokeswoman, told a daily news conference in Beijing.

If confirmed, the drone attack overnight would be the biggest Ukrainian drone attack inside Russia in the three years since the start of the war.

The Russian military said that the attack targeted ten regions, with its air defences shooting down 337 Ukrainian drones. The majority of the drones (126) were shot down over the Kursk region across the border from Ukraine, parts of which are controlled by Kyiv, according to a statement by Russia’s Defense Ministry.

Other regions listed in the statement included Belgorod, Bryansk and Voronezh on the border with Ukraine and some regions deeper inside Russia, such as Kaluga, Lipetsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Oryol and Ryazan.

Ninety-one drones were downed over the Moscow region, where one person was killed and nine more wounded. Two residential buildings had been damaged, according to Russian media.

President Zelensky praised Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s “wise perspective on global affairs” of after meeting Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader yesterday.

“With the Crown Prince, we had a detailed discussion on the steps and conditions needed to end the war and secure a reliable and lasting peace,” the Ukrainian leader posted on X. “I specifically emphasised the issue of the release of prisoners and the return of our children [from Russia], which could become a key step in building trust in diplomatic efforts. A significant part of the discussion was dedicated to the formats of security guarantees.

“We appreciate Saudi Arabia’s readiness to expand economic cooperation and invest in Ukraine. We discussed key sectors for investment, starting with security, energy, and infrastructure.”

• What’s on the agenda for Ukraine talks in Saudi Arabia?

Contact between Russia and the United States has become quite intensive, Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, said this morning, according to RIA news agency.

Zakharova was commenting on media reports that President Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff plans to visit Moscow this week to meet President Vladimir Putin.

President Zelensky is in Jeddah this morning before high-level talks aimed at ending the war with Russia without his country’s all-out surrender.

Ukraine is expected to lay out its proposal for a sea and air truce as an opening gambit in its pursuit of an equitable peace with Russia.

Zelensky, who will not take part in the talks, said in a post on X that Ukraine’s position would be “fully constructive” and he hoped for “practical outcomes” on ending the war. His chief of staff and defence and foreign ministers will meet President Trump‘s team led by the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio.

On route to the Saudi coastal city on Monday, Rubio said Ukraine would have to give up land seized by Russia as part of any peace.

Ukraine targeted Moscow in a “massive” overnight drone attack, Russian authorities said Tuesday.

“The Defense Ministry’s air defense continues to repel a massive attack by enemy drones on Moscow,” Sergei Sobyanin, the mayor, said on Telegram.

Russia’s defence ministry claimed that it shot down 337 UAVs across the country with 91 drones downed around the capital.

At least one person was killed and three more wounded in the southern suburbs of Moscow, according to the region’s governor, Andrei Vorobyov.

Vorobyov added that drone debris damaged at least seven units in a residential building in another suburb in the southeast. Flights were suspended at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport but later resumed, aviation watchdog Rosaviatsia said on Tuesday.