Ukraine-Russia war latest: Trump envoy rejects Starmer’s peace plan ahead of ceasefire talks in Saudi Arabia

A trio of U.S. and European officials familiar with intelligence details of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine told Reuters that the situation on the ground does not reflect the comments made by Trump and Putin.

One of the U.S. officials also said that the White House was briefed on the actual situation in Ukraine, so it’a unclear why Trump has and continues to claim that Ukrainian troops in Russia’s Kursk region are surrounded.

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For Donald Trump, talks with the Kremlin are a path to ending the Ukraine conflict as fast as possible. And if there’s a Nobel Peace Prize in it for him, all well and good. Securing some great deals for US business would be even better. For Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, talks are a path to victory and to the victor, the spoils. To get there, the KGB veteran has read Trump like a book.

Putin has correctly calculated the precise way to bamboozle Trump into agreeing to his maximalist demands is to sweeten any eventual deal with some attractive business propositions for the Americans.

“The two leaders agreed that a future with an improved bilateral relationship between the United States and Russia has huge upside,” read the official White House readout of the two-hour Trump-Putin conversation earlier this week, jarringly mixing the lexicon of international diplomacy with that of real estate. “This includes enormous economic deals and geopolitical stability when peace has been achieved.”

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Russia launched its third consecutive overnight air attack on Kyiv, wounding one person and damaging several houses in the region surrounding the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv’s regional governor said this morning.

A 37-year-old man has been hospitalised after he received shrapnel wounds in his upper body and head, governor Mykola Kalashnyk said on his Telegram channel.

This comes just hours after Russia’s attack injured a 54-year-old woman and damaged windows of multi-story and residential buildings in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia region.

Firefighters continued for the fifth day to fight a fire at an oil depot in Russia’s Krasnodar region, sparked last week by a drone attack that authorities blamed on Ukraine, the regional administration said.

“One of the tanks and oil products inside the facility are burning,” the administration said in a post on the Telegram yesterday.

“As of 1700 GMT on Sunday, the area of the fire at the depot near the village of Kavkazskaya was around 2,000sqm (21,500sqft)”, the administration said on Telegram.

The fire area nearly doubled the night before following an oil products spill.

The Russian foreign ministry said the incident amounted to a violation of an agreement to halt attacks on energy infrastructure under efforts to secure a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine.

Local authorities had brought in firefighting trains loaded with water to help to battle the blaze till yesterday.

The depot is a rail terminal for Russian oil supplies for a pipeline to Kazakhstan.

The electronic hum in the sky above told him that the Russians were on a hunting safari and that he was the prey. Leaping from his bicycle, Oleksandr left its wheels spinning as he bolted through a hole in a fence hoping to find cover.

Horrified to discover he was still in the open air, he threw himself against the fence, hoping to blend in, to somehow hide. The drone tracked sideways, hung above him, and dropped its bomb.

The explosion tore a chunk of his leg away.

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Officials from Ukraine and Russia are holding ceasefire talks in Saudi Arabia, as US president Donald Trump reportedly pushes to secure a truce in time for Easter.

Kyiv’s delegation sat down with Washington’s team in Riyadh on Sunday night, with Moscow set to separately follow suit on Monday – in what are believed to be the first such parallel peace talks since the early days of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion.

Here, The Independent takes a look at what to expect from the US-led talks in Saudi Arabia, which came just hours after Russia killed seven people – including a five-year-old child – in overnight drone strikes on Kyiv, and four people in Donetsk:

Russian president Vladimir Putin‘s top security adviser Sergei Shoigu has landed in North Korea and plans to meet its leader Kim Jong Un, the TASS news agency reported on Friday, his latest visit amid dramatic advances in security relations between the two countries.

The TASS report did not provide further details and North Korea’s state media did not report on Mr Shoigu’s arrival.

Mr Shoigu, Russia’s defence minister until last May and secretary of the Security Council since then, had earlier made visits to Pyongyang as North Korea allegedly geared up to deploy soldiers to fight for Russia in its war against Ukraine.

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In remarks that will do little to assuage European fears that the White House is increasingly parroting Kremlin propaganda, Donald Trump’s special envoy has claimed that the “elephant in the room” in peace talks is whether Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky can acknowledge Moscow’s claimed right to Crimea and four “Russian-speaking” regions in eastern Ukraine.

Despite being unable to name two of the four mainland regions – which Mr Putin partly occupies, and attempted to illegally annex following sham referenda in September 2022 – and using the Russian name for a third, Steve Witkoff said he believed the “central issue” in the conflict was whether Ukraine would relent control of them to Moscow.

Claiming an “overwhelming majority” of residents in the contested regions had indicated a preference for Russian rule, despite reports of ballots being cast at gunpoint, Mr Witkoff went on to claim that “the Russians are de facto in control of these territories”.

Many thousands of Ukrainians have given their lives to defend territory in Donetsk and Luhansk since 2014, and in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson since Russia’s full-scale invasion three years ago. While Moscow currently controls most of Donetsk and Luhansk, they hold minimal territory in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, with fierce fighting still ongoing in all four regions.

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Ukraine’s defence minister Rustem Umerov said talks with the US delegation in Saudi Arabia on Sunday were “constructive and meaningful”.

“We discussed key issues, particularly the energy sector,” Mr Umerov said in a post on social media.

Mr Umerov led the Ukrainian delegation for the talks on Sunday, which will be followed by a meeting between Russian and US officials on Monday – marking the first such parallel peace talks since the early days of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion.