Donald Trump says he hopes to have something to announce after his phone call with Vladimir Putin on Tuesday.
The US president and his Russian counterpart are due to talk on Tuesday. The Kremlin has confirmed that talks between Mr Putin and Mr Trump will go ahead as planned tomorrow.
“We will see if we have something to announce maybe by Tuesday. I will be speaking to President Putin on Tuesday,” Mr Trump said while flying from Florida to Washington on Air Force One on Sunday night. “A lot of work’s been done over the weekend. We want to see if we can bring that war to an end.”
The US president’s comments came as a Russian official said Moscow will seek “ironclad” guarantees in any peace deal that Nato nations will exclude Kyiv from membership, and that Ukraine will remain “neutral”.
Russia’s deputy foreign minister Alexander Grushko also repeated the Kremlin’s position that Moscow is categorically against the deployment of Nato observers to Ukraine.
Ukraine’s troops vastly outnumbered and facing ‘huge swarms’ of Russian drones in Kursk retreat
Ukraine FM meets with Starmer’s national security adviser
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, has met with Sir Keir Starmer’s national security advisor, Jonathan Powell, to discuss peace negotiations.
The pair met in New Delhi at a global conference. They “discussed the outcome of the Jeddah meeting [between Ukraine and the US last week] and further diplomatic efforts to achieve a fair peace,” according to a statement from Mr Sybiha on X.
The foreign minister added: “I thanked the United Kingdom for its leadership in forming the coalition of the willing.”
Mr Powell has been leading Sir Keir’s efforts to advise the Ukrainians on repairing relations with the US following a series of spats between Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and US leader Donald Trump.
Mr Powell visited Kyiv the weekend before the Ukrainian peace delegation arrived in Saudi Arabia to meet with Mr Trump’s team.
Ukraine and South Korea discuss ‘serious risk’ posed by Russia-North Korea relationship
Ukraine’s foreign minister has announced that he held talks with his South Korean counterpart to discuss the “serious risk” posed by Russia and North Korea’s deepening ties.
Pyongyang supplied Russia with roughly 12,000 troops last year, which were used to help Vladimir Putin expel the Ukrainian forces holding parts of the border region of Kursk.
In return, Kim Jong-un received oil, air defences and military-technological help.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), a security think tank funded by Canberra’s defence ministry, says Russia’s support is “highly valuable” for North Korea.
“Moscow’s assistance to Pyongyang is somewhat destabilising for East Asia, since any increase in North Korean military strength heightens the risk of war on the Korean Peninsula. South Korea should respond by helping Ukraine,” they wrote last month.
We have some more details on Russian involvement in a Lithuania arson attack
Lithuanian prosecutors accused Russia’s military intelligence on Monday of orchestrating an arson attack on an Ikea store in Vilnius in May, and suggested it may have been targeted because the chain’s logo uses the same colours as Ukraine’s flag.
The fire broke out in the store in Lithuania’s capital three days before a shopping centre in neighbouring Poland was hit by a blaze that authorities there said they suspected may have been part of a growing Russian sabotage campaign.
Russia denies carrying out sabotage attacks and says the West is stoking anti-Russian feeling by blaming Moscow for every incident. Russia’s GRU military intelligence service could not be immediately contacted for comment on Monday.
Investigations had found that the IKEA fire was linked to Russian military intelligence through a chain of more than 20 intermediaries, Arturas Urbelis, from the Lithuanian prosecutor general’s office, said.
“The chain includes the organisers, then more organisers for certain goals, then more intermediaries, all down to the perpetrators. It is a multi-stage, very complex system,” Urbelis told reporters.
The store was not chosen randomly, he added. IKEA had halted operations in Russia after the invasion of Ukraine and “IKEA’s colours are the same as Ukraine’s flag – this has strong symbolic meaning,” Urbelis said. Ukraine’s flag and IKEA’s logo are blue and yellow.
The Swedish furniture giant said it appreciated the work investigators had done but did not want to comment further as the matter was before a court.
The fire, which was triggered by a timed detonator in the early hours of May 9, was quickly contained, Urbelis said.
Two Ukrainian citizens, one under 20, one under 18 at the time, were offered 10,000 euros and a used BMW vehicle for their efforts, and took numerous trips to Vilnius from Poland to scout and prepare, he added.
One of them was detained afterwards in Lithuania, the other in Poland and both will face trial in those countries, he added.
Ukraine: Russia ready to wipe out it’s people for victory
A senior adviser to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has claimed Russia is willing to wipe out its population for the sake of victory in Ukraine.
Mykhailo Podolyak wrote on X that the foundations of Russia’s success on the battlefield are “the corpses of their own soldiers”. He described their policy of using waves of infantry to soak up gunfire in close combat as the use of “semi-slaves”.
“If the aggressor is rewarded with Ukrainian territories for this bloodbath, it will inevitably encourage future wars. Without a doubt,” he wrote.
“But it will also reinforce the Kremlin’s belief in the effectiveness of wave assaults using semi-slaves—even in this century.
“The almost inevitable future aggression against Europe will wipe out what remains of the empire’s demographic potential. The beast devours everything around it—and itself.”
Source: independent.co.uk