Ukraines

On June 16, the Ukrainian government started the process for opening bids for foreign companies to mine lithium deposits in the country. Among the interested investors is a consortium linked to Ronald S Lauder, who is believed to be close to United States President Donald Trump.

The bid is part of a minerals deal signed in April that is supposed to give the US access to Ukraine’s mineral wealth. The agreement was negotiated over months and was touted by Trump as “payback” for US military support for the Ukrainian military.

The final text, which the Ukrainian side has celebrated as “more favourable” compared with previous iterations, paves the way for US investment in the mining and energy sectors in Ukraine. Investment decisions will be made jointly by US and Ukrainian officials, profits will not be taxed and US companies will get preferential treatment in tenders and auctions.

Trump’s demand for access to Ukrainian mineral wealth was slammed by many as infringing on Ukrainian sovereignty and being exploitative at a time when the country is fighting a war and is highly dependent on US arms supplies. But that is hardly an aberration in the record of relations between Ukraine and the West. For more than a decade now, Kyiv has faced Western pressure to make decisions that are not necessarily in the interests of its people.

Interference in domestic affairs

Perhaps the most well-known accusations of Western influence peddling have to do with the son of former US President Joe Biden – Hunter Biden. He became a board member of the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma in May 2014, three months after Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian president of Ukraine, fled to Russia during nationwide protests.

At that time, Joe Biden was not only vice president in President Barack Obama’s administration but also its pointman on US-Ukrainian relations. Over five years, Hunter Biden earned up to $50,000 a month as a board member. The apparent conflict of interest in this case bothered even Ukraine’s European allies.

But Joe Biden’s interference went much further than that. As vice president, he openly threatened then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko with blocking $1bn in US aid if he did not dismiss the Ukrainian prosecutor general, whom Washington opposed.

When Biden became president, his administration – along with the European Union – put pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to give foreign “experts” a key role in the election of judges for Ukraine’s courts. As a result, three of the six members on the Ethics Council of the High Council of Justice, which vets judges, are now members of international organisations.

There was fierce opposition to this reform, even from within Zelenskyy’s own political party. Nevertheless, he felt compelled to proceed.

The Ukrainian government also adopted other unpopular laws under Western pressure. In 2020, the parliament passed a bill introduced by Zelenskyy that removed a ban on the sale of private farmland. Although polls consistently showed the majority of Ukrainians to be against such a move, pressure from the West forced the Ukrainian president’s hand.

Widespread protests against the move were muffled by COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. Subsequently, Ukraine’s agricultural sector became even more dominated by large, export-oriented multinational companies with deleterious consequences for the country’s food security.

Attempts to challenge these unpopular laws were undermined by attacks on courts. For example, the Kyiv District Administrative Court ruled that the judicial reform law violated Ukraine’s sovereignty and constitution, but this decision was invalidated when Zelenskyy dissolved the court after the US imposed sanctions on its head judge, Pavlo Vovk, over accusations of corruption.

The Constitutional Court, where there were also attempts to challenge some of these laws, also faced pressure. In 2020, Zelenskyy tried to fire all the court’s judges and annul their rulings but failed. Then in 2021, Oleksandr Tupytskyi, the chairman of the court, was sanctioned by the US, again over corruption accusations. This facilitated his removal shortly thereafter.

With Western interference in Ukrainian internal affairs made so apparent, public confidence in the sovereignty of the state was undermined. A 2021 poll showed that nearly 40 percent of Ukrainians did not believe their country was fully independent.

Economic sovereignty

In step with interference in Ukraine’s governance, its economy has also faced foreign pressures. In 2016, US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt urged the country to become an “agricultural superpower”. And it appears that the country indeed has gone down that path, continuing the process of deindustrialisation.

From 2010 to 2019, industry’s share of Ukraine’s gross domestic product fell by 3.7 percentage points while that of agriculture rose by 3.4 percentage points.

This didn’t benefit Ukrainians. UNICEF found that nearly 20 percent of Ukrainians suffered from “moderate to severe food insecurity” from 2018 to 2020, a figure that rose to 28 percent by 2022. This is more than twice as high as the same figure for the EU.

This is because the expansion of agriculture has favoured export-oriented monocrops like sunflowers, corn and soya beans. Although Ukraine became the world’s biggest exporter of sunflower oil in 2019, a 2021 study found that the domination of agriculture by intensively farmed monoculture has put 40 percent of the country’s soil at risk of depletion.

The 2016 free trade agreement with the EU also encouraged low-cost exports. Due to the restrictive provisions of the agreement, Ukrainian business complained that domestic products were often unable to reach European markets while European producers flooded Ukraine. Ukraine had a 4-billion-euro ($4.7bn) trade deficit with the EU in 2021, exporting raw materials and importing processed goods and machinery.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s industrial output collapsed under the blows of closed export markets, Western competition and neoliberal economic policies at home. According to the Ministry of Economy, by 2019, automobile production had shrunk to 31 percent of its 2012 level, train wagon production to 29.7 percent, machine tool production to 68.2 percent, metallurgical production to 70.8 percent and agricultural machinery production to 68.4 percent.

In 2020, the government under the newly elected Zelenskyy tried to intervene. It proposed new legislation to protect Ukrainian industry, Bill 3739, which aimed to limit the amount of foreign goods purchased by Ukrainian state contracts. Member of parliament Dmytro Kiselevsky pointed to the fact that while only 5 to 8 percent of state contracts in the US and EU are fulfilled with imports, the same figures stood at 40 to 50 percent in Ukraine.

But Bill 3739 was immediately criticised by the EU, the US and pro-Western NGOs in Ukraine. This was despite the fact that Western countries have a range of methods to protect their markets and state purchases from foreigners. Ultimately, Bill 3739 was passed with significant amendments that provided exceptions for companies from the US and the EU.

The recent renewal of EU tariffs on Ukrainian agricultural exports, which had been lifted in 2022, is yet another confirmation that the West protects its own markets but wants unrestricted access to Ukraine’s, to the detriment of the Ukrainian economy. Ukrainian officials worry that this move would cut economic growth this year from the projected 2.7 percent to 0.9 percent and cost the country $3.5bn in lost revenues.

In light of all this, Trump’s mineral deal reflects continuity in Western policy on Ukraine rather than a rupture. What the US president did differently was show to the public how Western leaders bully the Ukrainian government to get what they want – something that usually happens behind closed doors.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

AARHUS, Denmark — In the windswept gardens of a Danish chateau, President Volodymyr Zelensky and some of Ukraine’s main European backers weighed options Thursday for filling the gap after the Trump administration paused weapons shipments to his country.

The U.S. move affects high-demand munitions, including Patriot missiles, the AIM-7 Sparrow air-to-air missile and shorter-range Stinger missiles. They are needed to counter incoming missiles, bring down Russian aircraft or counter drone attacks.

But they are in short supply, none are cheap, and some simply can’t be sourced elsewhere.

“We count on the continuation of American support because there are some items which Europe … doesn’t have for today,” Zelensky told reporters in Aarhus, Denmark, as a military helicopter hovered above and security personnel watched nearby woods.

Chief among them: Patriot missile systems and interceptors. “This is crucial,” he said.

Russia’s new push to capture more territory has put Ukraine’s defenses under severe strain, with the war now in its fourth year. Russian missiles and drones are battering Ukrainian cities. U.S.-led efforts to find a peace settlement have stalled.

It’s still unclear even to Zelensky what the White House intends for the weapons shipments. “I hope that maybe tomorrow, or close days, these days, I will speak about it with President Trump,” he said.

Europe’s reason to act

Many in the European Union are keen to step up. They see Russia’s invasion as a threat to their own security. Officials have warned that President Vladimir Putin could try to test Europe’s defenses in three to five years.

“All of us hope that the U.S. will continue the support for Ukraine,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said, flanking Zelensky. “But if there are any gaps, then I personally believe that we should be willing to fill in.”

Denmark — a key Ukraine backer — has just taken over the EU presidency for six months.

“The war in Ukraine has never only been about Ukraine. This is a war about the future of Europe,” she said. Most EU countries are members of NATO, which has just agreed that allies should invest 5% of the gross domestic product in defense.

Russia is the chief threat that warrants such spending, although Trump did cajole the Europeans and Canada into agreeing on the figure, which will require them to spend tens of billions of dollars more over the next decade.

Sourcing defense funds

Since the Trump administration warned that its security priorities lie elsewhere and that Europe must fend for itself, the European Commission’s priority has been to find extra money.

Commission President Ursula von der Leyen launched the EU’s big funding gun with $176 billion that countries, including Ukraine, can use to make joint purchases of priority weapons.

The EU’s executive branch also has loosened the rules on countries running up debt if they use the money for defense purposes. It hopes that hundreds of billions of extra euros could be made available, if members use the opportunity to spend more.

Then there are sanctions against Russia. EU nations are working on yet another raft of measures, but they are getting harder to agree on. It now falls to Denmark to try to chaperone the latest sanctions through.

“Russia is on the brink of recession,” noted von der Leyen, standing next to Zelensky. “Russia’s overheated war economy is coming to its limits. So for us, it is important to increase the pressure so that [Putin] comes to the negotiation table.”

Investing in Ukraine, the Danish way

Frederiksen’s government has led the way in investing in Ukraine’s defense industry, which can produce arms and ammunition more quickly and cheaply than elsewhere in Europe. She believes it’s the most effective way to help.

She also recently invited Ukrainian companies to set up shop on safer ground in Denmark, and the first companies could start production there in September. Danish officials are urging their European partners to follow suit.

Ukraine estimates that about 40% of its defense industrial capacity could be capitalized on if more European money were spent there.

Security and EU membership

Frederiksen said that helping Ukraine to join the EU is a security priority, but Hungary stands in the way. Prime Minister Viktor Orban insists that Ukraine should remain a buffer zone between Russia and NATO countries.

EU membership is meant to be a merit-based process, and Denmark has said that “all political and practical means” will be used to persuade Hungary — a small EU country and the only one standing in Ukraine’s way — to lift its veto.

Zelensky said Thursday that Ukraine has made significant progress in aligning with the EU’s rules despite the war, and called for the first phase of membership negotiations to begin as soon as possible.

“Sometimes it’s just difficult to be together in one building, all the government [and] the parliamentarians because of the attacks,” he explained.

Less palatable options

Calls are mounting for the Europeans to use Russian assets that they froze after the full-scale invasion in 2022 to help Ukraine. At the end of March, about $320 billion worth — the bulk of the assets — was being held by Belgian clearing house Euroclear.

The interest earned on those assets is being used to fund a $50-billion scheme set up by the Group of Seven powers to keep Ukraine’s economy afloat.

Some European leaders worry that confiscating Russia’s assets would deprive Ukraine of those profits — estimated at more than $3.5 billion a year. They fear it would also be fraught with legal obstacles and could harm the reputation of the euro single currency on international markets.

Another possibility might be for the Europeans to buy weapons directly from the United States but asked Thursday about that possibility — as well as the confiscation of Russian assets — neither Frederiksen nor von der Leyen would comment.

Cook writes for the Associated Press.

Russian leader indicates longterm plan to cut military spending, as his forces vie for foothold in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk.

Russian forces have continued to hammer Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, launching a deadly attack on the industrial city of Samar for the second time in three days.

Friday’s missile attack killed five people and injured 23 others in southeastern Samar – located outside the region’s main city, Dnipro – said regional governor Sergiy Lysak in a post on Telegram.

At least four of the wounded were in severe condition and were taken to hospital, he added.

The attack followed missile strikes earlier this week on both Dnipro and Samar, which killed at least 23, as Russian forces attempted to gain a foothold in Dnipropetrovsk for the first time in over three years of war.

Officials gave no immediate details about the damage inflicted on Samar, where an attack on an unidentified infrastructure facility on Tuesday killed two people.

Moscow earlier this week claimed to have captured two more villages near the border of the Dnipropetrovsk region.

Separately, authorities in Ukraine’s northern region of Kharkiv said Russian attacks killed one person and wounded three others.

Hundreds of kilometres to the south, in the Kherson region, authorities urged residents on Friday to prepare for extended periods without power after a Russian attack hit a key energy facility.

Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said on Telegram that “Russians decided to plunge the region into darkness”.

The Ukrainian air force said Russia had launched 363 long-range drones and eight missiles overnight into Friday, claiming that air defences stopped all but four of the drones and downed six cruise missiles.

Russia’s Defence Ministry, meanwhile, said 39 Ukrainian drones were downed in several regions overnight, including 19 over the Rostov region and 13 over the Volgograd region.

‘Find a path’ in peace talks

The continued attacks on Dnipropetrovsk came as President Vladimir Putin said that he intended to scale back military expenditure and also indicated he was ready for a new round of peace negotiations with Ukraine.

The Russian president said his country was ready to reduce the military budget in the long term, owing to budgetary pressures and the increased defence spending having fuelled inflation.

Speaking to reporters in Minsk, Belarus, on Friday, he alluded to a new round of peace negotiations with Ukraine, potentially in Istanbul, although the time and venue had yet to be agreed.

He acknowledged that the peace proposals from Russia and Ukraine “are two absolutely contradictory memorandums”, but added, “That’s why negotiations are being organised and conducted, in order to find a path to bringing them closer together.”

Putin added that the two sides’ negotiators were in constant contact and that Russia was ready to return the bodies of 3,000 more Ukrainian soldiers.

He also said relations between Russia and the United States were beginning to stabilise, attributing the improvement to efforts by US President Donald Trump.

“In general, thanks to President Trump, relations between Russia and the United States are beginning to level out in some ways,” said Putin.

Trump on Friday suggested progress may be on the horizon regarding Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“We’re working on that one,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “President Putin called up and he said, I’d love to help you with Iran. I said, do me a favour: I’ll handle Iran. Help me with Russia. We got to get that one settled. And I think something’s going to happen there.”

Ukrainian leader signs an accord with the Council of Europe to set up a special tribunal to one day put top Russian officials on trial.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has called for the prosecution of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he accused of being a “war criminal” for launching Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

Zelenskyy issued the call late on Wednesday after he signed an accord with the Council of Europe to set up a special tribunal to prosecute Russian officials, including Putin, for the invasion of Ukraine.

“We need to show clearly, aggression leads to punishment, and we must make it happen together, all of Europe,” said Zelenskyy after signing the accord with Council of Europe Secretary-General Alain Berset.

“It will take strong political and legal courage to make sure every Russian war criminal faces justice, including Putin,” Zelenskyy said.

Putin is already facing an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague for the alleged war crime of illegally transporting children out of Ukraine.

The ICC has the jurisdiction to investigate war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, but it does not have the jurisdiction to investigate “crimes of aggression” or the use of armed force against another state.

The special tribunal is being established to one day prosecute Russia’s “crime of aggression” for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The tribunal could, in theory, put on trial senior Russian figures, including Putin.

It has not yet been decided where the tribunal would be based, but Zelenskyy said The Hague, the home of the ICC, would be “perfect”.

This is the first time such a tribunal has been set up under the aegis of the Council of Europe, the continent’s top rights body.

Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, previously said the special tribunal would “give Ukraine a path to justice for the top-level decision to invade its territory – a wrong that no other international court or tribunal can currently address”.

The European Council said the proposed tribunal could potentially be used to prosecute North Korean and Belarusian individuals who assisted Russia in the invasion.

The 46-member Council of Europe is not part of the European Union and members include key non-EU European states such as Turkiye, the United Kingdom and Ukraine. Russia was expelled from the body in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine.

Alongside its arrest warrant for Putin, the ICC is also seeking to arrest four of Russia’s top commanders for targeting civilians.

Missile and drone strikes target residential areas in numerous districts across Kyiv.

A “massive” Russian drone and missile attack has killed at least six people in Ukraine’s capital and the surrounding region, according to Ukrainian officials.

Officials said the strikes on Monday morning targeted residential areas in numerous districts across Kyiv. The assault on the city, the second huge overnight blitz in a week, suggests Russia is eager to raise the pressure as global attention is dominated by the United States’s decision to join Israel’s escalating air campaign against Iran.

“Another massive attack on the capital. Possibly, several waves of enemy drones,” Tymur Tkachenko, head of Kyiv’s military administration, said in a statement.

“The Russians’ style is unchanged – to hit where there may be people,” Tkachenko said on Telegram. “Residential buildings, exits from shelters – this is the Russian style.

As well as residential buildings, hospitals, sports infrastructure, and the entrance of a metro station being used as a bomb shelter were hit during the large-scale attack, emergency services said.

The attack caused damage in six of Kyiv’s 10 districts and wounded at least 10 people, Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said on Telegram.

“At least four people were killed in Kyiv’s Shevchenkivskyi district, where the entire entrance of a residential high-rise building was destroyed,” Klymenko said.

“There are still people under the rubble,” he added.

Meanwhile, a Russian short-range drone attack in the Chernihiv region late on Sunday killed two people and wounded 10 others, including three children, according to authorities.

Another person was killed and eight were wounded overnight in the city of Bila Tserkva, some 85km (53 miles) southwest of Kyiv.

Sabotage

Russia has not commented on the strikes. Both sides deny targeting civilians in the war that Russia launched in February 2022, but thousands of civilians have been killed in the conflict, the vast majority of them Ukrainian.

Russia’s deadliest attack on Kyiv came last week as it unleashed hundreds of drones, killing 28 people and injuring more than 150, with Ukrainian officials saying nearly 30 sites were hit in waves of attacks.

Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskii, amid the rise in attacks on the capital, has pledged to intensify strikes on Russia.

“We will not just sit in defence. Because this brings nothing and eventually leads to the fact that we still retreat, lose people and territories,” he said, according to the AFP news agency.

To that end, Ukraine “will increase the scale and depth” of its attacks on Russian military targets, he added.

Russian forces launched at least 47 drones against Ukraine and fired three missiles overnight on Sunday, the Ukrainian air force said.

Kyiv has accused Moscow of deliberately sabotaging efforts towards agreeing a peace deal, which has been pushed by US President Donald Trump, to prolong its full-scale offensive on the country and to seize more territory.

Ukraine’s leader was denied a meeting with his most powerful ally, after Donald Trump left the summit a day early.

The Group of Seven summit in Canada has ended without leaders issuing a joint statement in support of Ukraine, as Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that “diplomacy is now in a state of crisis”.

The summit of major industrial democracies, which wrapped up in the Canadian Rocky Mountain resort of Kananaskis late on Tuesday, had been intended to showcase unity on major global issues.

But unlike in previous years, when the group had jointly denounced Russian “aggression” against Ukraine, this time it was unable to issue a statement in support of the embattled Western ally, in a sign of growing differences within the group amid escalating global crises.

Zelenskyy met the leaders of Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Japan, along with NATO chief Mark Rutte, on the final day of the conference. However, a meeting with the leader of the group’s most powerful member, the United States – President Donald Trump – did not take place after he left the summit a day early to address the escalating hostilities between Israel and Iran from Washington.

Zelenskyy said after the meeting that he had told the remaining G7 leaders that “diplomacy is now in a state of crisis”, and asked them to continue calling on Trump “to use his real influence” to press for an end to the war, according to a post on his official Telegram account.

Statement on US resistance retracted

A Canadian official initially told reporters on the sidelines of the summit that plans for a joint statement on Ukraine had been dropped after meeting resistance from the US, which wanted to water down the content, news agencies reported.

But Emily Williams, a spokesperson for Canada’s prime minister, later retracted the briefing statement and said “no proposed statement regarding Ukraine was distributed to other leaders”, agencies reported.

A Canadian official said there had never been an attempt to issue a joint statement on Ukraine because of Trump’s wishes to continue negotiating with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the AFP news agency reported.

“It was clear that it would not have been feasible to find detailed language that all G7 partners could agree to in that context,” the official said on condition of anonymity.

Trump had underlined the differences in views towards Russia within the group on Monday, when he said it had been a mistake to expel Moscow from what was formerly the G8 in response to its invasion and annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014.

Canada pledges military support

Zelenskyy had arrived at the summit calling for support from Ukraine’s allies, and declaring he was ready for peace negotiations.

“We are ready for the peace negotiations, unconditional ceasefire,” he said. “But for this, we need pressure.”

He left with a pledge from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to provide 2 billion Canadian dollars ($1.47bn) in new military assistance for Kyiv, as well as to impose new financial sanctions on Russia.

Trump did agree to a group statement before his departure, calling for a resolution of the Israel-Iran conflict. The statement, issued on Monday, backed Israel, calling Iran the principal source of regional instability and terror, and asserting that Israel has the right to defend itself.

The statement called for a “de-escalation of hostilities”, despite some bellicose social media posts from Trump hinting at greater US military involvement in the conflict.

Russian officials said Sunday that Moscow is still awaiting official confirmation from Ukraine that a planned exchange of 6,000 bodies of soldiers killed in action will take place, reiterating allegations that Kyiv had postponed the swap.

On the front line in the war, Russia said that it had pushed into Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region.

Russian state media quoted Lt. Gen. Alexander Zorin, a representative of the Russian negotiating group, as saying that Russia delivered the first batch of 1,212 bodies of Ukrainian soldiers to the exchange site at the border and is waiting for confirmation from Ukraine, but that there were “signals” that the process of transferring the bodies would be postponed until next week.

Citing Zorin on her Telegram channel, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova asked whether it was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky‘s “personal decision not to take the bodies of the Ukrainians” or whether “someone from NATO prohibited it.”

Ukrainian authorities said plans agreed upon during direct talks in Istanbul on Monday were proceeding accordingly, despite what Ukraine’s intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, called Russian attempts to “unilaterally dictate the parameters of the exchange process.”

People rest in a metro station, being used as a bomb shelter, during a Russian drone attack in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Friday.

(Dan Bashakov/AP)

“We are carefully adhering to the agreements reached in Istanbul. Who, when and how to exchange should not be someone’s sole decision. Careful preparation is ongoing. Pressure and manipulation are unacceptable here,” he said in a statement on Telegram on Sunday.

“The start of repatriation activities based on the results of the negotiations in Istanbul is scheduled for next week, as authorized persons were informed about on Tuesday,” the statement said. “Everything is moving according to plan, despite the enemy’s dirty information game.”

Russia and Ukraine each accused the other on Saturday of endangering plans to swap 6,000 bodies of soldiers killed in action, which was agreed upon during the talks in Istanbul, which otherwise made no progress toward ending the war.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speaks to journalists during a press conference in Kyiv, Ukraine.

(Evgeniy Maloletka / Associated Press)

Vladimir Medinsky, an aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin, led the Russian delegation. Medinsky said that Kyiv called a last-minute halt to an imminent swap. In a Telegram post on Saturday, he said that refrigerated trucks carrying more than 1,200 bodies of Ukrainian troops from Russia had already reached the agreed exchange site at the border when the news came.

According to the main Ukrainian authority dealing with such swaps, no date had been set for repatriating the bodies. In a statement Saturday, the agency also accused Russia of submitting lists of prisoners of war for repatriation that didn’t correspond to agreements reached Monday.

It wasn’t immediately possible to reconcile the conflicting claims.

Russia says it is heading into Dnipropetrovsk region

In other developments, Russia’s Defense Ministry said Sunday that its forces had reached the western edge of the Donetsk region, one of the four provinces Russia illegally annexed in 2022, and that troops were “developing the offensive” in the neighboring Dnipropetrovsk region. This would be the first time Russian troops had pushed into the region in the more than three-year-old war.

Ukraine didn’t immediately respond to the claim, and the Associated Press couldn’t immediately verify it.

Russia’s advance would mark a significant setback for Ukraine’s already stretched forces as peace talks remain stalled and Russian troops have made incremental gains elsewhere.

Russia and Ukraine exchange aerial attacks

One person was killed and another seriously wounded in Russian aerial strikes on the eastern Ukrainian Kharkiv region. These strikes came after Russian attacks targeted the regional capital, also called Kharkiv, on Saturday. Regional police in Kharkiv said on Sunday that the death toll from Saturday’s attacks had increased to six people. More than two dozen others were wounded.

Russia fired a total of 49 exploding drones and decoys and three missiles overnight, Ukraine’s air force said Sunday. Forty drones were shot down or electronically jammed.

Russia’s defense ministry said that its forces shot down 61 Ukrainian drones overnight, including near the capital.

Five people were wounded Sunday in a Ukrainian drone attack on a parking lot in Russia’s Belgorod region, according to regional Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov. Two people were wounded when a Ukrainian drone attack sparked a fire at a chemical plant in the Tula region, local authorities said.

Russian authorities said early Sunday that Vnukovo and Domodedovo airports, two international airports serving Moscow, temporarily suspended flights because of a Ukrainian drone attack. Later in the day, Domodedovo halted flights temporarily for a second time, along with Zhukovsky airport.

Ukrainian air force says Russia struck with 215 missiles and drones in overnight assault.

At least five people have been killed and more than 20 wounded as Russia launched a barrage of missiles, drones and bombs across Ukraine, officials said.

The Ukrainian air force said on Saturday that Russia struck with 215 missiles and drones overnight, and Ukrainian air defences shot down and neutralised 87 drones and seven missiles.

At least three people were killed and 17 others, including two children, were wounded in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, Mayor Ihor Terekhov said, describing the assault as “the most powerful” on the city since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

He reported 48 Iranian-made drones, two missiles and four guided bombs were fired before dawn at the city of 1.4 million people, located just 50km (30 miles) from the Russian border.

“Drones are still circling above,” Terekhov wrote on Telegram at 4:40am (01:40 GMT), as air raid sirens wailed across the city. Residential buildings and civilian infrastructure were heavily damaged.

The northeastern city was also hit by a missile strike on Thursday that left 18 people injured, including four children.

Surge in attacks

Elsewhere in the south, Russian shelling hit the city of Kherson, killing a couple and damaging residential buildings, regional Governor Oleksandr Prokudin confirmed. In Dnipro, two women, aged 45 and 88, were injured in separate attacks.

Officials said on Friday that at least six people were killed and dozens were wounded on Friday when Russia launched an aerial bombardment across Ukraine. Rescue workers in the city of Lutsk on Saturday recovered another body, raising the toll from Friday’s attacks to seven.

Moscow said Friday’s assault was carried out in response to Ukrainian “terrorist acts” against Russia, saying military sites were targeted.

The surge in Russian attacks follows a Ukrainian drone operation last weekend that damaged nuclear-capable military aircraft at Russian airbases deep behind the front lines, including in Siberia. Russian President Vladimir Putin has pledged to retaliate for the attack, which Kyiv reportedly planned for 18 months using smuggled drones.

Ukraine, meanwhile, continues to push for a 30-day ceasefire and presented its latest proposal during talks in Istanbul on Monday. But Moscow has rejected calls for a truce, insisting the war is a matter of national survival.

“For us, it is an existential issue,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Friday. “It concerns our national interest, our safety, and the future of our country.”

Putin has demanded Ukraine withdraw from four partially occupied regions, abandon its NATO ambitions and halt all Western military cooperation – terms Kyiv has dismissed as unacceptable. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has instead called for a three-way summit involving himself, Putin and United States President Donald Trump.

At least four people were killed and 20 were wounded in multiple Russian missile and drone attacks overnight on the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, local officials have said.

Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Friday morning search and rescue operations were continuing in several locations. Among the wounded, 16 were admitted to hospital.

Ukrainian authorities said Russian forces launched 407 drones and 45 missiles, including cruise and ballistic missiles, of which they succeeded in destroying, respectively, around 200 and 30.

“It was a very frightening night. We heard some of the drones go over this area in central Kyiv, giant explosions ringing out across the city, some so loud that they were shaking the glass here of our hotel, we’ve seen pictures of people who took shelter in the metro stations underground and underground car parks,” said Al Jazeera’s Charles Stratford, reporting from the Ukrainian capital.

Multiple explosions were heard in Kyiv, where falling debris sparked fires across several districts as air defence systems attempted to intercept incoming targets, said Tymur Tkachenko, head of the Kyiv City Administration.

“Our air defence crews are doing everything possible. But we must protect one another – stay safe,” Tkachenko wrote on Telegram.

Ukraine’s human rights chief, Dmytro Lubinets, called for a strong international response to the overnight attack, saying the assault violated basic human rights.

“Russia is acting like a terrorist, systematically targeting civilian infrastructure,” Lubinets wrote on Telegram. “The world must respond clearly and take concrete steps, including condemning the aggressor’s actions.”

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha also called on Western allies to ramp up pressure on Russia.   “Russia’s overnight attack on civilians once again demonstrates that the international pressure on Moscow must be increased as soon as possible,” he said in a statement.

Moscow denies targeting civilians since it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Authorities reported damage in several districts, and rescue workers were responding at multiple locations. They urged residents to seek shelter.

Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs said three emergency workers were killed in Kyiv while responding to the aftermath of Russian attacks. “They were working under fire to help people,” the ministry said in a statement.

In Solomyanskyi district, a fire broke out on the 11th floor of a 16-storey residential building. Emergency services evacuated three people from the apartment, and rescue operations were under way. Another fire broke out in a metal warehouse.

Tkachenko said the metro tracks between two stations in Kyiv were damaged in the attack, but no fire or injuries occurred.

The attack hit at least six regions across Ukraine, leaving a trail of civilian injuries, damaged infrastructure and disrupted utilities.

The number of people injured in a Russian attack on the western city of Ternopil early Friday rose to 10, including five emergency workers, regional governor Viacheslav Nehoda said. The strike damaged industrial and infrastructure facilities, left parts of the city without electricity, and disrupted water supplies.

Three people were injured in Ukraine’s central Poltava region following a Russian attack that damaged administrative buildings, warehouses and a cafe, regional head Volodymyr Kohut said. Fires caused by the strike have been extinguished, and debris fell on a private home.

Russian forces also struck the Khmelnytskyi region overnight, damaging a private residential building, outbuildings, a fence, and several vehicles, regional governor Serhii Tiuryn said.

Meanwhile, air defence forces shot down three Russian missiles over the western Lviv region overnight, the regional head Maksym Kozytskyi said.

In the northern Chernihiv region, a Shahed drone exploded near an apartment building, shattering windows and doors, according to regional military administration chief Dmytro Bryzhynskyi. He said explosions from ballistic missiles were also recorded on the outskirts of the city.

The overnight attack took place as hopes for a truce between Russia and Ukraine seemed to be faltering, despite two rounds of direct talks in Istanbul.

On Thursday, United States President Donald Trump said it may be better to let Ukraine and Russia “fight for a while” rather than pursue peace immediately – a remarkable shift from Trump’s previous appeals for a quick end to the war.

Earlier this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin told Trump in a telephone conversation that Moscow would have to respond to the earlier huge Ukrainian drone attacks deep inside Russia against Russian military warplanes.

WASHINGTON — President Trump said that Russian President Vladimir Putin told him “very strongly” in a phone call Wednesday that he will respond to Ukraine’s weekend drone attack on Russian airfields as the deadlock over the war drags on and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky dismisses Russia’s ceasefire proposal.

The U.S. president said in a social media post that his lengthy call with Putin “was a good conversation, but not a conversation that will lead to immediate Peace.”

It’s the first time Trump has weighed in on Ukraine’s daring attack inside Russia. The U.S. did not have advance notice of the operation, according to the White House, a point the president emphasized during the call with the Russian leader, according to Putin’s foreign affairs advisor.

The U.S. has led a recent diplomatic push to stop the full-scale invasion, which began Feb. 24, 2022.

Trump, in his social media post, did not say how he reacted to Putin’s promise to respond to Ukraine’s attack, but his post showed none of the frustration that Trump has expressed with his Russian counterpart in recent weeks over his prolonging of the war.

Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign affairs advisor, said at a briefing that the two leaders characterized the call as “positive and quite productive,” and reaffirmed their readiness to stay in touch.

“I believe it was useful for Trump to hear our assessments of what happened,” Ushakov said, noting that the discussion of the attacks was one of the key points in the conversation. He didn’t respond to a question about what the Russian response to the attacks could be.

Trump repeatedly promised to end the war quickly and even said he would accomplish it before he was sworn in. But he lost patience with Putin in recent weeks, publicly pleading with him to stop fighting and even said late last month that the Russian leader “has gone absolutely CRAZY.”

Trump, however, has not committed to backing a bipartisan push to sanction Putin.

The call was Trump’s first known talk with Putin since May 19. They also discussed, according to Trump and Ushakov, Iran’s nuclear program and the possibility of Russia engaging in talks with Tehran as the U.S. pushes the Islamic Republic to abandon its rapidly advancing nuclear program.

It was unclear whether Trump also planned to speak with Zelensky. The White House did not respond to a message Wednesday afternoon.

Zelensky brushes off Russian plan and pushes for talks

The Ukrainian leader earlier Wednesday dismissed Russia’s ceasefire plan as “an ultimatum” and renewed his call for direct talks with Putin to break the stalemate over the war, which has dragged on for nearly 3½ years.

Putin, however, showed no willingness to meet with Zelensky, expressing anger Wednesday about what he said were Ukraine’s recent “terrorist acts” on Russian rail lines in the Kursk and Bryansk regions on the countries’ border.

“How can any such [summit] meetings be conducted in such circumstances? What shall we talk about?” Putin asked in a video call with top Russian officials.

Putin accused Ukraine of seeking a truce only to replenish its stockpiles of Western arms, recruit more soldiers and prepare new attacks such as those in Kursk and Bryansk.

Both sides exchanged memorandums setting out their conditions for a ceasefire for discussion at Monday’s direct peace talks between delegations in Istanbul, their second meeting in just over two weeks. Zelensky had challenged Putin to meet him in Turkey, but the Kremlin leader stayed away.

Russia and Ukraine have established red lines that make a quick deal unlikely, despite a U.S.-led international diplomatic push to stop the fighting. The Kremlin’s Istanbul proposal contained a list of demands that Kyiv and its Western allies see as nonstarters.

‘This document looks like spam’

Zelensky said that the second round of talks in Istanbul was no different from the first meeting on May 16. Zelensky described the latest negotiations in Istanbul as “a political performance” and “artificial diplomacy” designed to stall for time, delay sanctions and convince the United States that Russia is engaged in dialogue.

“The same ultimatums they voiced back then — now they just put them on paper…. Honestly, this document looks like spam. It’s spam meant to flood us and create the impression that they’re doing something,” Zelensky said in his first reaction to the Russian document.

The Ukrainian leader said that he sees little value in continuing talks at the current level. Defense Minister Rustem Umerov led the Ukrainian delegation in Istanbul, while Vladimir Medinsky, an aide to Putin, headed the Russian team.

Zelensky said he wants a ceasefire with Russia before a possible summit meeting with Putin, possibly also including Trump, in an effort to remove obstacles to a peace settlement.

U.S. Defense secretary stays away

A second round of peace talks Monday between Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Istanbul lasted just over an hour and made no progress on ending the war. They agreed only to swap thousands of their dead and seriously wounded troops.

A new prisoner exchange with Russia could take place over the weekend, Zelensky said.

In tandem with the talks, both sides have kept up offensive military actions along the roughly 620-mile front line and carried out deep strikes.

Ukraine’s Security Service gave more details Wednesday about its spectacular weekend drone strike on Russian air bases, which it claimed destroyed or damaged 41 Russian aircraft, including strategic bombers.

The agency released more video showing drones swooping under and over parked aircraft and featuring some planes burning. It also claimed the planes struck included A-50, Tu-95, Tu-22, Tu-160, An-12, and Il-78 aircraft, adding that the drones had highly automated capabilities and were partly piloted by an operator and partly by using artificial intelligence, which flew the drone along a planned route in the event it lost signal.

The drones were not fully autonomous and a “human is still choosing what target to hit,” said Caitlin Lee, a drone warfare expert at Rand, a think tank.

Ukraine’s security agency said it also set off an explosion Tuesday on the seabed beneath the Kerch Bridge, a vital transport link between Russia and illegally annexed Crimea, claiming it caused damage to the structure.

But Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday that there was no damage.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said Wednesday that its troops have taken control of another village in northern Ukraine’s Sumy region, on the border with Russia. Putin announced May 22 that Russian troops aim to create a buffer zone that might help prevent Ukrainian cross-border attacks. Since then, Russia’s Defense Ministry claims its forces have taken control of nine Sumy villages.

Arhirova and Price write for the Associated Press. Arhirova reported from Kyiv, Ukraine. Illia Novikov in Kyiv, Chris Megerian in Washington, Emma Burrows in London and Katie Marie Davies in Manchester, England, contributed to this report.

US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he had a “good conversation” with Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a call about Ukraine’s recent drone attack and Iran.

Following Ukraine’s major drone attack deep on air bases inside Russia, Trump reported that Putin told him Russia “will have to respond”.

Trump also warned in a social media post that the phone call, which lasted more than an hour, would not “lead to immediate Peace”.

The two leaders also discussed Iran, and Putin suggested he could help with nuclear talks with the country.

The conversation between the two leaders marks the first since Ukraine launched an audacious attack striking Russian air bases on 1 June, targeting nuclear-capable long-range bombers.

In his post, Trump said that Putin told him – “very strongly” – that he “will have to respond to recent attacks on the airfields.”

Last week, Trump appeared to set a two-week deadline for Putin, threatening to change how the US is responding to Russia if he believed Putin was still “tapping” him along on peace efforts in Ukraine.

The comment was one of a string of public critical remarks by Trump, who earlier had said that Putin had gone “absolutely crazy” and is “playing with fire” when Russia intensified drone and missile attacks on targets in Ukraine.

Trump made no mention of a deadline or his previous remarks in Wednesday’s post on his Truth Social platform.

The post also comes just days after a second round of direct peace talks between the warring sides, held in Istanbul, ended without a major breakthrough, although the two sides agreed to swap more prisoners of war.

Ukrainian negotiators said Russia rejected an “unconditional ceasefire” – a key demand of Kyiv and its Western allies including the US.

The Russian team said they’d proposed multi-day ceasefires in “certain areas” of the frontline in Ukraine, although they gave no further details.

Trump has previously – and repeatedly – said he believes the two sides are making progress, despite ongoing fighting on the frontline and aerial attacks carried out in both Russia and Ukraine.

Additionally, Trump said that on the call he and Putin discussed Iran, and he believed the two “were in agreement” that “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon”.

The US reportedly proposed Iran halt all production of enriched uranium – which can be used to make reactor fuel but also nuclear weapons – and instead rely on a regional consortium for supplies. Iran has not yet responded to the plan presented at talks last Saturday.

According to Trump, Putin “suggested that he will participate in discussions with Iran and that he could, perhaps, be helpful in getting this brought to a rapid conclusion.”

“It is my opinion that Iran has been slow walking their decision on this very important matter,” Trump wrote. “We will need a definitive answer in a very short period of time.”

VLADIMIR Putin has warned Donald Trump he “will have to respond” to Ukraine’s daring drone strike on Russian airfields, the US president revealed.

In a dramatic post on Truth Social, Trump said the Russian tyrant issued the warning during a 75-minute phone call where the pair discussed rising tensions in Ukraine, as well as Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

1

“It was a good conversation, but not a conversation that will lead to immediate Peace,” Trump wrote.

“President Putin did say, and very strongly, that he will have to respond to the recent attack on the airfields.”

The call, confirmed by the Kremlin, came after Ukrainian drones targeted Russian warplanes stationed at airbases deep behind enemy lines — a bold assault seen as a major embarrassment for Mad Vlad Putin.

More to follow… For the latest news on this story, keep checking back at The U.S. Sun, your go-to destination for the best celebrity news, sports news, real-life stories, jaw-dropping pictures, and must-see videos.

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Eighteen months in the making, Ukraine’s Operation Spider’s Web saw hundreds of AI-trained drones target military aircraft deep inside Russia’s borders.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Sunday’s attacks will go down in history.

He followed them up with a proposal for an unconditional ceasefire as the two sides met in Istanbul.

The European Union is preparing its 18th package of sanctions on Russia, while US President Donald Trump has threatened to use “devastating” measures against Russia if he feels the time is right.

So, is the time right now?

And after the audacious attack, does Zelenskyy finally hold the cards?

Presenter: Dareen Abughaida

Guests:

Hanna Shelest – Security studies programme director at the Ukrainian Prism think tank

Pavel Felgenhauer – Independent defence analyst

Anatol Lieven – Eurasia programme director at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft

Kyiv, Ukraine – Any description of Ukraine’s attacks on Russia’s fleet of strategic bombers could leave one scrambling for superlatives.

Forty-one planes – including supersonic Tu-22M long-range bombers, Tu-95 flying fortresses and A-50 early warning warplanes – were hit and damaged on Sunday on four airfields, including ones in the Arctic and Siberia, Ukrainian authorities and intelligence said.

Moscow did not comment on the damage to the planes but confirmed that the airfields were hit by “Ukrainian terrorist attacks”.

Videos posted by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), which planned and carried out the operation, which was called The Spiderweb, showed only a handful of planes being hit.

The strategic bombers have been used to launch ballistic and cruise missiles from Russian airspace to hit targets across Ukraine, causing wide scale damage and casualties.

The bomber fleet is one-third of Moscow’s “nuclear triad”, which also consists of nuclear missiles and missile-carrying warships.

According to some observers, the attack shattered Russia’s image of a nuclear superpower with a global reach.

The attack inadvertently “helped the West because it targeted [Russia’s] nuclear potential”, Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy head of the Ukrainian military’s general staff, told Al Jazeera.

While the assault decreases Russia’s potential to launch missiles on Ukraine, it will not affect the grinding ground hostilities along the crescent-shaped, 1,200km (745-mile) front line, he said.

Romanenko compared The Spiderweb’s scope and inventiveness to a string of 2023 Ukrainian attacks against Russia’s Black Sea fleet that was mostly concentrated in annexed Crimea.

Although Ukraine’s navy consisted of a handful of small, decades-old warships that fit into a football field-sized harbour, Kyiv reinvented naval warfare by hitting and drowning Russian warships and submarines with missiles and air and sea drones.

Moscow hastily relocated the decimated Black Sea fleet eastwards to the port of Novorossiysk and no longer uses it to intercept Ukrainian civilian vessels loaded with grain and steel.

The Spiderweb caught Russia’s military strategists off-guard because they had designed air defences to thwart attacks by missiles or heavier, long-range strike drones.

Instead, the SBU used 117 toy-like first-person-view (FPV) drones, each costing just hundreds of dollars, that were hidden in wooden crates loaded onto trucks, it said.

Their unsuspecting drivers took them right next to the airfields – and were shocked to see them fly out and cause the damage that amounted to $7bn, the SBU said.

“The driver is running around in panic,” said a Russian man who filmed thick black smoke rising from the Olenegorsk airbase in Russia’s Arctic region of Murmansk, which borders Norway.

Other videos released by the SBU were filmed by drones as they were hitting the planes, causing thundering explosions and sky-high plumes of black smoke.

Russia’s air defence systems guarding the airfields were not designed to detect and hit the tiny FPV drones while radio jamming equipment that could have caused them to stray off course wasn’t on or malfunctioned.

The SBU added a humiliating detail – The Spiderweb’s command centre was located in an undisclosed location in Russia near an office of the Federal Security Service (FSB), Moscow’s main intelligence agency, which Russian President Vladimir Putin once headed.

“This is a slap on the face for Russia, for FSB, for Putin,” Romanenko said.

However, Kyiv didn’t specifically target the pillar of Russia’s nuclear triad.

“They are destroying Russian strategic aviation not because it’s capable of carrying missiles with nuclear warheads but because of its use to launch … nonnuclear [missiles],” Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s Bremen University, told Al Jazeera.

The operation, which took 18 months to plan and execute, damaged a third of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.

“This is our most far-reaching operation. Ukraine’s actions will definitely be in history textbooks,” he wrote on Telegram late on Sunday. “We’re doing everything to make Russia feel the necessity to end this war.”

The SBU used artificial intelligence algorithms to train the drones to recognise Soviet-era aircraft by using the planes displayed at an aviation museum in central Ukraine, the Clash Report military blogger said on Monday.

‘The very logic of the negotiations process won’t change’

The attack took place a day before Ukrainian and Russian diplomats convened in Istanbul to resume long-stalled peace talks.

But it will not affect the “logic” of the negotiations, a Kyiv-based political analyst said.

“Emotionally, psychologically and politically, the operation strengthens the positions of Ukrainian negotiators,” Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Penta think tank, told Al Jazeera. “But the very logic of the negotiations process won’t change.”

“Both sides will consider [US President] Donald Trump an arbiter, and whoever is first to leave the talks loses, ruins its negotiation positions with the United States,” Fesenko said.

Once again, the talks will likely show that the sides are not ready to settle as Russia is hoping to carve out more Ukrainian territory for itself and Ukraine is not going to throw in the towel.

“Russia wants to finish off Ukraine, and we’re showing that we will resist, we won’t give up, won’t capitulate,” Fesenko said.

By Monday, analysts using satellite imagery confirmed that 13 planes – eight Tu-95s, four Tu-22Ms and one An-12 – have been destroyed or damaged.

“What a remarkable success in a well-executed operation,” Chris Biggers, a military analyst based in Washington, DC, wrote on X next to a map showing the destruction of eight planes at the Belaya airbase in the Irkutsk region in southeastern Siberia.

Five more planes have been destroyed at the Murmansk base, according to Oko Hora, a group of Ukrainian analysts.

The Spiderweb targeted three more airfields, two in western regions and one near Russia’s Pacific coast, according to a photo that the SBU posted showing its leader, Vasyl Malyuk, looking at a map of the strikes.

But so far, no damage to the airfields or the planes on them has been reported.

Russia is likely to respond to The Spiderweb with more massive drone and missile attacks on civilian sites.

“I’m afraid they’ll use Oreshnik again,” Fesenko said, referring to Russia’s most advanced ballistic missile, which can speed up to 12,300 kilometres per hour (7,610 miles per hour), or 10 times the speed of sound, and was used in November to strike a plant in eastern Ukraine.

In the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, escaping the war with Russia is nearly impossible.

On certain days, when the wind shifts, residents of this historic city can hear the distant rumble of artillery fire from the front line, some 30km (18.5 miles) away.

Most nights, Russian kamikaze drones packed with explosives buzz overhead as parents put their children to bed.

Three years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the unrelenting war exerts a heavy psychological burden on many in Kharkiv. Yet, there is a place in the city where, for a few fleeting hours, the war seems to vanish.

Beneath the Kharkiv National Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, in a dim, brick-walled basement, a dance company has established a refuge from drones and bombs – a space where audiences can lose themselves in performances of classic ballets.

In April, this underground venue hosted performances of Chopiniana, an early 20th-century ballet set to the music of Frederic Chopin. Despite the improvised setting, the ballet was staged with full classical grandeur, complete with corps de ballet and orchestra.

It marked a significant milestone for Kharkiv’s cultural life: the first complete classical ballet performance in the city since February 2022, when Russian troops launched their invasion of Ukraine.

“In spite of everything – the fact that bombs are flying, drones, and everything else – we can give a gift of something wonderful to people,” said Antonina Radiievska, artistic director of Opera East, the ballet company behind the production.

“They can come and, even if it’s just for an hour or two, completely immerse themselves in a different world.”

Despite Ukraine’s rich tradition in classical ballet, the art form now seems far removed from the everyday existence of Ukrainians living through war. Daily routines revolve around monitoring apps for drone alerts, sleeping on metro station floors to escape air raids, or seeking news of loved ones on the front line. Pirouettes, pas de deux and chiffon tutus feel worlds away.

Nevertheless, the journey of Kharkiv’s ballet through wartime reflects the ways in which Ukrainian society has adapted and evolved.

On February 23, 2022, the National Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre staged a performance of the ballet Giselle. The next day, Russia launched its full-scale invasion. As Moscow’s forces advanced towards Kharkiv and threatened to seize the city, the theatre closed its doors and much of the ballet troupe departed.

Some regrouped in Slovakia and Lithuania, mounting ballet productions abroad with assistance from European sponsors.

By 2023, although the conflict ground on, the situation in Kharkiv, in Ukraine’s northeast, had stabilised after Russian ground troops withdrew. A new realisation took hold – this was a long-term reality. Locals began referring to the city, and themselves, with the Ukrainian word “nezlamniy”, meaning invincible.

That year, work began on transforming the theatre’s basement into a performance venue. By October 2023, it was being used for rehearsals. The following spring, authorities permitted the theatre to admit audiences, and small-scale ballet performances, including children’s concerts, resumed.

The revival of Chopiniana marked the next chapter in Kharkiv’s wartime cultural journey.

Staging a classical opera again signals that Ukraine endures, says Igor Tuluzov, director-general of Opera East. “We are demonstrating to the world that we really are a self-sufficient state, independent, in all its aspects, including cultural independence,” he said.

The auditorium now seats 400 people on stackable chairs, compared with the 1,750 seats in the main theatre above, where the plush mustard seats remain empty.

The stage is a quarter the size of the main one. Grey-painted bricks, concrete floors, and exposed pipes and wiring form a stark contrast to the varnished hardwood and marble of the theatre above. The basement’s acoustics, performers say, fall short of the cavernous main auditorium.

For artistic director Radiievska, however, the most important thing is that, after a long pause, she and her troupe can once again perform for a live audience.

“It means, you know, life,” she said. “An artist cannot exist without the stage, without creativity, without dance or song. It’s like a rebirth.”

Russia and Ukraine are expected to each swap 1,000 prisoners of war as part of deal reached at recent talks in Istanbul.

Russia has received a list of names of prisoners of war (POWs) that Ukraine wants freed as part of an expected exchange between the two countries, a Kremlin spokesperson told the Russian news agency Interfax.

Dmitry Peskov told Interfax on Thursday that the list had been received after Moscow gave Kyiv its own list of prisoners it wants released.

The exchange – which will see each side free 1,000 POWs in what would be the largest swap of the war – was agreed to during talks last week in the Turkish capital, Istanbul.

Those discussions marked the first direct peace negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian delegations since 2022, the year the war began.

In advance of the meeting, Ukraine had called for a 30-day ceasefire, but Moscow rejected the proposal, agreeing only to the prisoner swap.

Ukrainian officials have since accused Russia of deliberately delaying peace talks while consolidating territorial gains on the battlefield.

The major prisoner swap is a “quite laborious process” that “requires some time”, said Peskov, adding that “the work is continuing at a quick pace.”

“Everybody is interested in doing it quickly,” the Kremlin spokesperson said.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Thursday that the deal “to release 1,000 of our people from Russian captivity was perhaps the only tangible result of the meeting in Turkiye”.

“We are working to ensure that this result is achieved,” he said in a post on X.

Zelenskyy added that Defence Minister Rustem Umerov is overseeing the exchange process, supported by several Ukrainian government ministries, intelligence agencies and the president’s own office.

“The return of all our people from Russian captivity is one of Ukraine’s key priorities,” Zelenskyy said. “I am grateful to everyone who is contributing to this effort.”

As Ukraine, the European Union, and the United States press Moscow to return to negotiations, Peskov dismissed reports about future peace talks taking place at the Vatican, saying, “There is no concrete agreement about the next meetings.”

US President Donald Trump spoke with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, on Monday and urged an end to the “bloodbath”.

Putin thanked Trump for supporting the resumption of direct talks between Russia and Ukraine, and said his government “will propose and is ready to work with the Ukrainian side on a memorandum on a possible future peace accord”.

Meanwhile, Russia’s defence ministry said on Thursday that its air defences shot down 105 Ukrainian drones overnight, including 35 over the Moscow region.

The ministry said it downed 485 Ukrainian drones over several regions and the Black Sea between late Tuesday and early Thursday.

In southern Ukraine, Kherson Governor Oleksandr Prokudin also said on Thursday that one person was killed in a Russian artillery attack on the region.

He said 35 areas in the Kherson region, including the city of Kherson, came under artillery shelling and air attacks over the past day, wounding 11 people.

Zelenskyy said the “most intense situation” remains in the Donetsk region, however, while Ukrainian forces continue “active operations in the Kursk and Belgorod regions” inside Russia.

Ukraine’s European allies are considering the possibility of using their air forces to defend the country’s western skies from drone and missile attacks without the help of the United States, sources familiar with the talks tell Al Jazeera.

The plan, known as Skyshield, could put NATO planes and pilots into Ukrainian airspace for the first time, sending a powerful political message to Russia that Europe is committed to Ukraine’s defence.

Skyshield is more likely to come into effect as part of any ceasefire, especially if European ground forces are committed. But it was designed by Ukrainian and British aviation experts to work under combat conditions as well.

“It’s being taken very seriously into consideration by the UK, France,” said Victoria Vdovychenko, an expert on hybrid warfare at Cambridge University’s Centre for Geopolitics, who has sat at some of the meetings. “German colleagues and Italian colleagues also do know about that, as well as the Scandinavian colleagues,” she said.

When it comes to implementing Skyshield in wartime conditions, she admits, “some of the partners are still fluctuating in their decision making”.

Skyshield was published in February and is the brainchild of Price of Freedom, a Ukrainian think tank founded by Lesya Orobets. She came up with the idea during an air defence crisis last spring, when Republican lawmakers in the US delayed the passage of a $60bn bill to send more aid to Ukraine.

During a phone call with the head of Ukraine’s air force, Orobets was told, “We are in the middle of a missile crisis. We don’t have enough [interceptors] to shoot down the missiles.”

Skyshield calls for the deployment of 120 European aircraft to protect Ukrainian civilian infrastructure and export corridors along the Danube River and the Black Sea, freeing up the Ukrainian Air Force to focus on the first line of defence in the contested east of the country.

“There would be a piece of land of 200 kilometres [125 miles] between them at least,” said Orobets.

European jets would be based in neighbouring Poland and Romania, and fly mostly west of the Dnipro, protecting Kyiv on both sides of the river in the north of the country.

A higher-risk strategy

Western commanders are wary of costs, casualties and military implications.

Hourly flight costs, which include training, parts and maintenance, range from $28,000 for an F-16 to about $45,000 for a fourth-generation Rafale jet, Colonel Konstantinos Zikidis of the Hellenic Air Force told Al Jazeera.

“We’d have to pay for people to be there, several shifts a day in all specialities … it will be exhausting,” he said, referring to aircraft technicians and pilots.

“On the other hand, the proposal downplays the effectiveness of air defence systems, which are very effective against cruise missiles and have a far lower hourly operating cost than aircraft,” Zikidis said.

“It’s also not really the job of aircraft to hunt down cruise missiles. They can do it if they are given coordinates by air command. They can’t go out on flight patrol and spot them by chance. So you need a very thick radar array to cover a given area, especially at low altitude.”

European NATO members do not operate AWACS airborne radar, which would be the ideal tool for the job according to Zikidis, but Ukrainian pilots have already downed Russian cruise missiles using air-to-air missiles, suggesting the ground-based radar assets are there.

Europe has provided Ukraine with Patriot and Samp-T long-range air defence systems and Iris-T medium-range systems, but these are enough only to protect larger urban centres, said Vdovychenko. Russia is also stepping up its attacks. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on May 4 that Russia had launched almost 1,200 long-range kamikaze drones and 10 missiles in just a week.

These types of weapons are routinely directed at civilian and industrial infrastructure, not the front lines, and Russian President Vladimir Putin is increasing production. Last year, Russia’s factory at Alabuga produced 6,000 Shahed/Geran long-range drones, said Ukraine’s head of the Center for Countering Disinformation, Andriy Kovalenko, last month. He said Putin set production at 8,000-10,000 drones this year.

The effects are visible. High-profile attacks on Kryvyi Rih, Kharkiv and Kyiv have killed dozens of people this year.

The second problem European air forces would face is that of casualties.

“If one European plane falls and a pilot is killed, it will be very difficult for a European government to explain it,” said Zikidis. “For a Greek pilot to go and get killed in Ukraine could bring the government down,” he added.

“I don’t think that there is a political will [for that], and that is what stops this partially,” said Vdovychenko.

But Orobets put this risk in a wider context.

“We’re talking about catching cruise missiles and putting down the offensive drones, which is quite an easy target for trained pilots,” she told Al Jazeera. “So we do consider Skyshield to be less risky [than enforcing a no-fly zone] or any participation of the European troops closer to the front line.”

Strategic intimidation

Thirdly, there are the military implications. Skyshield is partly about freeing up the Ukrainian Air Force to strike deeper inside Russia, deploying the estimated 85 F-16s it is being given.

That is because Russia has this year intensified its use of controlled air bombs (CABs), which are directed against front lines, reportedly dropping 5,000 in April versus 4,800 in March, 3,370 in February and 1,830 in January.

Ukraine would target the airfields from which Russian jets take off to drop the CABs. It would also move missile launch systems closer to the front lines, increasing their reach inside Russia.

CABs are Russia’s most effective weapon at the front, and it has successfully leveraged its nuclear arsenal to intimidate NATO into allowing them to be flown in.

The Biden administration had refused to allow Ukraine to deploy Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMSs), which have a range of 300km (190 miles), because Russia considered their use dependent on US intelligence, in its view, making the US a cobelligerent in the war.

It has expressed exactly the same view of Germany sending its 500km (310-mile) range Taurus missile to Ukraine.

In the same vein, Russia has threatened to act against any European force deployment to Ukraine.

Russian Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu last month told a summit of the foreign ministers of the BRICS group of states in Rio de Janeiro that “military units of Western states on Ukrainian territory … will be considered as legitimate targets”.

These threats have been effective. The Biden administration was against the idea of allowing the Polish and Romanian air forces to shoot down drones and missiles in Ukrainian airspace that were headed into Polish and Romanian airspace, Orobets said.

The Biden administration “thought that if any American pilot on any American jet or any Western jet would enter the Ukrainian airspace, then America or another country would become cobelligerent”, she said.

The same applied to the notion of Europeans entering Ukraine’s airspace.

“They were scared that Russians would then escalate to the level of a conflict they could not sustain. So that was the only reason. There was no reason like, ‘Oh, we cannot do that’,” she said.

Pontiff calls for peace and unity at the service, which attracts dignitaries from around the world.

Pope Leo XIV has met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy after his inaugural Mass in the Vatican, where he delivered a message of love and unity to a crowd of 200,000 pilgrims.

“We thank the Vatican for its willingness to serve as a platform for direct negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. We are ready for dialogue in any format for the sake of tangible results. We appreciate the support for Ukraine and the clear voice in defense of a just and lasting peace,” Zelenskyy posted on X.

No statement has been issued by the Vatican yet regarding Sunday’s meeting.

Leo, formerly Cardinal Robert Prevost, was officially installed as the head of the Catholic Church at an outdoor Mass in St Peter’s Square with world leaders and European royalty in attendance.

In his sermon, Leo, the first American pope, called for unity within the church, saying he wanted it to act as a force for peace in the world.

“I would like that our first great desire be for a united church, a sign of unity and communion, which becomes a leaven for a reconciled world,” he said.

“In this our time, we still see too much discord, too many wounds caused by hatred, violence, prejudice, the fear of difference and an economic paradigm that exploits the Earth’s resources and marginalises the poorest.”

Leo said he was assuming the role as leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Roman Catholics “with fear and trembling” and insisted he would not lead like “an autocrat”.

“It is never a question of capturing others by force, by religious propaganda or by means of power. Instead, it is always and only a question of loving, as Jesus did,” he said, in an apparent nod to the split between conservative and liberal factions within the church.

‘The rich heritage of the Christian faith’

The 69-year-old pope, who was born in Chicago and spent years as a missionary in Peru, succeeds the late Pope Francis, whose 12-year tenure was marked by tensions with traditionalists within the church. In an apparent nod to conservatives, Leo said he was committed to protecting “the rich heritage of the Christian faith” and repeatedly used the words “unity” and “harmony”.

Before the ceremony, Leo took his first popemobile ride through St Peter’s Square, waving to crowds cheering, “Viva il Papa.”

Dignitaries in attendance included the presidents of Israel, Peru and Nigeria; the prime ministers of Italy, Canada and Australia; German Chancellor Friedrich Merz; and Spain’s King Felipe and Queen Letizia.

The United States delegation was led by Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic who had clashed with Francis over the White House’s approach to immigration. Vance shook hands with Zelenskyy at the start of the ceremony, in contrast to the previous meeting between the two men and President Donald Trump in a fiery encounter in front of the world’s media at the White House in February.

Leo prayed for the victims of the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza in his sermon, saying Ukraine was being “martyred” and lamenting that Palestinians were being “reduced to starvation”.

Putin’s absence casts doubt on peace talks in Turkiye, raising concerns about potential intensified sanctions.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he is sending a team headed by his defence minister to Istanbul for the first direct talks with a Russian delegation since the early weeks of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

Zelenskyy announced the move on Thursday after the Kremlin said Russian President Vladimir Putin had no intention to meet with him in Turkiye, sending instead a junior delegation – a move that Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna said was “like a slap in the face”.

The Ukrainian president said in a news conference in the Turkish capital, Ankara, that the Russian delegation doesn’t include “anyone who actually makes decisions”, accusing Moscow of not making efforts to end the war.

The Ukrainian delegation will be headed by Defence Minister Rustem Umerov with the aim “to attempt at least the first steps toward de-escalation, the first steps toward ending the war – namely, a ceasefire”, he said.

It was not immediately clear when the delegations would meet.

Al Jazeera’s Sinem Koseoglu, reporting in front of the Ukrainian embassy in Ankara, said Zelenskyy chose a delegation “in equilibrium” with the Russian one.

“He said they didn’t mind taking the first step towards an immediate ceasefire that is necessary for direct peace talks,” she said.

Still, “there won’t be any negotiations, and Zelenskyy underlined that even his delegation has no mandate to decide anything. So tomorrow, it is probably going to be technical talks between the two delegations,” she added.

US President Trump, who had pressed for Putin and Zelenskyy to meet face-to-face in Istanbul, brushed off Putin’s absence from the talks.

“Nothing’s going to happen until Russian President Vladimir Putin and I get together, OK?” Trump said on board Air Force One just before landing in Dubai on the third stop of his Middle East trip. “I didn’t think it was possible for Putin to go if I’m not there.”

Putin’s absence punctured hopes of a breakthrough in ceasefire efforts that were given a push in recent months by the Trump administration and Western European leaders amid the intense manoeuvring. It also raised the prospect of intensified international sanctions on Russia that have been threatened by the West.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan earlier welcomed Zelenskyy with an honour guard at the presidential palace in Ankara before the two held talks.

“Now, after three years of immense suffering, there is finally a window of opportunity,” Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said at a NATO meeting taking place separately in Turkiye. “The talks … hopefully may open a new chapter.”