{"id":378972,"date":"2025-08-28T00:31:14","date_gmt":"2025-08-28T00:31:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/378972\/"},"modified":"2025-08-28T00:31:14","modified_gmt":"2025-08-28T00:31:14","slug":"ukraine-war-briefing-zelenskyy-picks-olha-stefanishyna-as-ambassador-to-us-ukraine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/378972\/","title":{"rendered":"Ukraine war briefing: Zelenskyy picks Olha Stefanishyna as ambassador to US | Ukraine"},"content":{"rendered":"
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    Volodymyr Zelenskyy has appointed Olha Stefanishyna, a former top cabinet minister, as Ukraine\u2019s ambassador to the US, ending months of speculation<\/strong>. She takes over as ambassador from Oksana Markarova, who held the position for six years, including more than three years of full-scale war with Russia, and became a target for partisan criticism from Republicans<\/a>. It was announced in July that Markarova would be replaced. Stefanishyna served in Zelenskyy\u2019s administration as a deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration, playing a major role in the country\u2019s integration into western institutions, and as minister of justice.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

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    Zelenskyy announced his officials will meet US counterparts in New York on Friday<\/strong> as the Ukrainian president continues to push for a one-on-one meeting with Vladimir Putin despite Kremlin refusals. \u201cFriday, meetings will take place in New York, in the United States, with President Trump\u2019s team\u201d after \u201cmeetings in Switzerland\u201d on Thursday, Zelenskyy said. The real estate developer Steve Witkoff, officially an envoy of Donald Trump, earlier told American media about the meeting.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

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    Zelenskyy\u2019s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak,<\/strong> said on Wednesday that he was in Riyadh along with security council chief Rustem Umerov ahead of the US talks. Yermak said the talks in Riyadh focused on paths to peace in Ukraine and Saudi Arabia\u2019s participation in this process<\/strong>. Yermak said they met the Saudi defence minister and national security adviser. Zelenskyy said the delegation would also hold talks on Thursday in Switzerland before proceeding to New York.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

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    Russians are suddenly struggling to fill their fuel tanks<\/strong> after weeks of Ukrainian drone strikes crippled refining capacity across the country, Pjotr Sauer reports<\/a>. Petrol stations have run dry while prices have surged to record highs and motorists queue for hours. Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, has been among the hardest hit.<\/strong> The peninsula, which usually hosts a flood of Russian holidaymakers in the summer, has had its airports shut because of the drone threat, forcing visitors on to roads and piling further pressure on already scarce supplies.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

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    \u201cMore than 100,000 households\u201d in Ukraine had blackouts on Wednesday after Russian strikes on civilian infrastructure<\/strong>, Zelenskyy said. \u201cUnfortunately, energy facilities were damaged. The attack caused power outages in the Poltava, Sumy and Chernihiv regions \u2026 All emergency services are working on the ground to restore power as quickly as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

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    Friedrich Merz said \u201cRussia is and will remain, for the long term, the greatest threat to freedom, peace and stability in Europe<\/strong>\u201d as Germany\u2019s chancellor announced a strengthening of its armed forces. The German cabinet has signed off on a draft bill to build up the ranks of military volunteers<\/strong> that leaves the door open to a resumption of conscription, which Germany had until 2011.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

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    German weapons maker Rheinmetall opened Europe\u2019s largest munitions plant<\/strong> on Wednesday, a move hailed as boosting western defences by the Nato chief, Mark Rutte. The factory in Unterluess in northern Germany will be able to produce 350,000 artillery shells a year by 2027<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

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    Ukraine is looking at how to share battlefield data with allies<\/strong>, the country\u2019s deputy prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov said on Wednesday, calling the information one of Kyiv\u2019s \u201ccards\u201d to strengthen its position<\/strong> as it negotiates support from friendly countries. \u201cThe data we have is priceless for any country,\u201d said Fedorov, who heads Ukraine\u2019s digitalisation ministry<\/strong>, adding that Ukraine was \u201cvery careful\u201d about sharing it. Large datasets are crucial for training artificial intelligence (AI) models to recognise patterns and make predictions.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

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    Nato said all its members were set this year to hit the alliance\u2019s long-held defence spending target of 2% of GDP<\/strong>. The allies agreed at a June summit in The Hague to set that bar higher, targeting 5% five of GDP comprising 3.5% on core defence spending and 1.5% on a looser range of areas such as infrastructure and cybersecurity.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Volodymyr Zelenskyy has appointed Olha Stefanishyna, a former top cabinet minister, as Ukraine\u2019s ambassador to the US, ending…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":378973,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5311],"tags":[49,978,659],"class_list":{"0":"post-378972","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-united-states","9":"tag-us","10":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378972\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/378973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}