Ukraine | Pakistan

Russia targeted Ukraine with a record 728 drones overnight, shortly after US President Donald Trump pledged to send more defensive weapons to Kyiv and aimed unusually direct criticism at Russian President Vladimir Putin. Ukrainian air defence units destroyed almost all the drones, including through electronic jamming systems, Ukraine’s air force said on the Telegram messaging app. The attack, which follows a series of escalating air assaults on Ukraine in recent weeks, showed the need for “biting” sanctions on the sources of income Russia uses to finance the war, including on those who buy Russian oil, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Telegram. Trump said on Tuesday he was considering supporting a bill in the Senate that would impose steep sanctions on Russia, including 500 per cent tariffs on nations that buy Russian oil, gas, uranium and other exports. “We get a lot of ‘b******t’ thrown at us by Putin … He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless,” Trump said at a cabinet m...

Russian President Vladimir Putin told United States President Donald Trump in a phone call on Thursday that Moscow wants a negotiated end to the Ukraine war, but will not step back from its original goals, a Kremlin aide said. In a wide-ranging conversation that also covered Iran and the Middle East, Trump “again raised the issue of an early end to military action” in Ukraine, the aide, Yuri Ushakov, told reporters. “Vladimir Putin, for his part, noted that we continue to seek a political and negotiated solution to the conflict,” Ushakov said. Putin briefed Trump on the implementation of agreements reached between Russia and Ukraine last month to exchange prisoners-of-war and dead soldiers, Ushakov said, and told him that Moscow was ready to continue negotiations with Kyiv. “Our president also said that Russia will achieve the goals it has set: that is, the elimination of the well-known root causes that led to the current state of affairs, to the current acute confrontation, and Russia will not back down from...

Ukraine appealed to the United States for clarity on Wednesday after it was caught off guard by a White House announcement that Washington was halting some arms shipments to the war-battered country. The Ukrainian defence ministry, which is deeply dependent on US arms, said it had not been notified about the reduction in aid announced one day earlier. Moscow revelled in the decision, saying it could bring the end of the war closer. Any slowdown in US support could harm Kyiv’s ability to fend off escalating Russian aerial bombardments or frontline gains. Kyiv has long feared halts to US aid after Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, having criticised the tens of billions of dollars in support and weapons sent by his predecessor, Joe Biden. “It will [be] even more scary, even more painful, and even more civilians will suffer,” Kyiv resident Yevgenia Prysiazhna told AFP, referring to an uptick in overnight drone and missile attacks on Ukraine. “I really hope that this is a temporary decision,” th...

Emmanuel Macron and Vladimir Putin on Tuesday spoke by telephone for the first time in over two-and-a-half years, with the French president urging a ceasefire in Ukraine but the Russian leader hitting back that the West was to blame for the conflict. One week after a ceasefire ended Israel’s 12-day war with Iran, the two […]

A Russian missile attack on Ukraine’s southeastern Dnipropetrovsk region on Tuesday killed at least nine people, damaged civilian infrastructure and wounded dozens of train passengers, officials said. The two-wave strike killed seven in the regional capital of Dnipro, said governor Serhiy Lysak, where the blast wave also shattered train carriage windows and showered passengers with broken glass. Nearly 70 people, including 10 children, were injured, he said, adding the numbers could still rise. Two people were also killed in the town of Samar, around 10 kilometres from Dnipro, the state emergencies service said. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha called on Kyiv’s Western partners to respond to the attack. Nato leaders are currently in The Hague for an alliance summit, where President Volodymyr Zelenskiy hopes to secure more military support against Russia’s full-scale invasion, launched in 2022. “It is a matter of credibility for allies to step up pressure on Moscow,” Sybiha wrote on X. He added that sc...

ST PETERSBURG: Russian President Vladimir Putin quipped on Friday that in his view the whole of Ukraine was “ours” and cautioned that advancing Russian forces could take the Ukrainian city of Sumy as part of a bid to carve out a buffer zone along the border. Putin, who ordered troops into Ukraine in 2022 after eight years of fighting in the country’s east, also said he was not seeking the capitulation of Ukraine or denying its sovereignty, but that Ukraine had to be neutral. Russia currently controls about a fifth of Ukraine, including Crimea, more than 99 per cent of the Luhansk region, over 70pc of the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, and fragments of the Kharkiv, Sumy and Dnipropetrovsk regions. Asked about fresh Russian advances, Putin told the St Petersburg International Economic Forum that he considered Russians and Ukrainians to be one people and “in that sense the whole of Ukraine is ours”. Kyiv and its Western allies say Moscow’s claims to four Ukrainian regions and Crimea are illegal, and ...

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that in his view the whole of Ukraine was “ours” and cautioned that advancing Russian forces could take the Ukrainian city of Sumy as part of a bid to carve out a buffer zone along the border. Ukraine’s foreign minister denounced the statements as evidence of Russian “disdain” […]

Ukraine on Sunday said it had received another transfer of 1,200 bodies from Russia as part of an exchange agreement struck in Istanbul talks earlier this month. “Another 1,200 bodies which the Russian side claims belong to Ukrainian citizens, including military personnel, were returned to Ukraine,” Kyiv’s headquarters for the treatment of prisoners of war wrote on social media. “In total, 4,812 bodies have been returned this week,” Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov said on Facebook. “I am grateful to everyone involved in this humanitarian mission,” he said. Ukraine has not said whether it has transferred any bodies to the Russian side. The two sides agreed a large-scale exchange of prisoners and bodies of killed soldiers during their latest round of direct talks in Istanbul on June 2. Both Russia and Ukraine typically do not disclose their military losses. In a rare public estimate, President Volodymyr Zelensky told US news outlet NBC earlier this year that more than 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers have bee...

KYIV: Russia and Ukraine said they exchanged an unspecified number of sick and wounded prisoners of war on Tuesday under an agreement reached at peace talks last week in Turkey. The handover took place after an initial swap of prisoners under the age of 25 was conducted on Monday. “Today marks the first stage of […]

Russia carried out “massive” drone attacks on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv and port city of Odesa early on Tuesday, killing one person and hitting a maternity hospital, Ukrainian officials said, calling for further sanctions. Moscow has kept up its attacks on Ukraine, which has hit back with strikes deep inside Russian territory, while peace talks held over the weekend failed to yield a breakthrough towards ending the three-year war. Aside from an agreement to exchange prisoners, progress has stalled and Russia has repeatedly rejected calls for an unconditional ceasefire. “Russia lies every day about its desire for peace and attacks people every day. Time to impose sanctions. Time to support Ukraine with weapons. Time to prove that democracy has power,” Andriy Yermak, head of the Ukrainian presidential office, said on Telegram. A 59-year-old man was killed in the Russian strikes on residential buildings in Odesa on Tuesday, and at least four others were wounded, said Governor Oleg Kiper. “The enemy massively attack...

Russia fired a record 479 drones at Ukraine in an overnight aerial barrage, Kyiv’s air force said on Monday, the latest massive attack as Moscow rejects calls for a ceasefire. The attack caused damage in several Ukrainian regions, though there were no reports of people killed or mass casualties. “Enemy air strikes were recorded in 10 spots,” the Ukrainian air force said. The mayor of the western city of Rivne, Oleksandr Tretyak, called it “the largest attack” on the region since the start of the war. Russia has escalated its attacks across Ukraine in recent weeks, which Kyiv says demonstrate that Moscow has no intention of halting its three-year-long invasion and is not serious about peace talks. The barrages have raised concerns about the capacity of Ukraine’s stretched air defence systems, but the air force said that it shot down or intercepted 460 of the drones, as well as 19 out of 20 missiles fired by Russia overnight. Ukraine also said it had launched its own overnight strike on an electronics factory t...

Russia attacked the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv at night and in the evening with drones, missiles and guided bombs, killing at least four people and injuring more than 60, including a baby, local officials said on Saturday. One of Ukraine’s largest cities, Kharkiv is located just a few dozen kilometres from the Russian border and has been under constant Russian shelling during more than three years of war. “Kharkiv is currently experiencing the most powerful attack since the start of the full-scale war,” Terekhov said on the Telegram messenger early on Saturday. Dozens of explosions were heard in the city through the night and Russian troops were striking simultaneously with missiles, drones, and guided aerial bombs, he said. Multi-storey and private residential buildings, educational and infrastructure facilities were attacked, Terekhov noted. Kharkiv governor Oleh Syniehubov said that one of the city’s civilian industrial facilities was attacked by 40 drones, one missile and four bombs, causing a fire...

Ukraine denied Russian allegations on Saturday that it had indefinitely postponed prisoner swaps, accusing Moscow of “playing dirty games” after overnight Russian missile and bomb strikes on Kharkiv left three people dead and 22 injured. Separately, Russian officials said a Ukrainian drone attack in the Moscow region wounded two people. At a second round of […]

The Kremlin said on Friday that the Ukraine war was “existential” for Russia, after it launched a wave of retaliatory drone and missile strikes that killed at least three in Kyiv. AFP journalists heard air raid sirens and explosions ring out over the capital throughout the night as Ukrainian air defence batteries intercepted waves of Russian drones and missiles. Kyiv announced that Russia had fired 45 missiles and 407 drones in the barrage, after Russian President Vladimir Putin vowed retaliation for an audacious Ukrainian attack on several Russian airbases. President Volodymyr Zelensky in response urged allies to “decisively” ramp up pressure on Russia to halt the war, which has left tens of thousands dead over more than three years of fighting. “We heard a drone — we heard it coming very close, and then there was an explosion,” Ksenia, a Kyiv resident, told AFP outside a multiple-storey housing block that was left with a charred and gaping hole. “Our windows and window panes were blown out, but we got away ...

US President Donald Trump said he spoke to Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Wednesday about Ukraine and Iran, warning that the Kremlin leader had “very strongly” pledged to respond to Kyiv’s stunning drone attack on Russian bombers. Trump said that there was no “immediate peace” on the horizon in Ukraine — which Russia invaded in 2022 — following what he described as a one-hour and 15-minute call with the Russian president. On Iran, Trump said that Putin had offered to “participate” in talks on Tehran’s nuclear programme, as Trump accused the Islamic republic of “slow walking” its response to Washington’s offer of a deal. The call came three days after Ukraine conducted a massive, daring drone attack against Russian military airbases, saying it had destroyed several Russian nuclear-capable bombers worth billions of dollars. Trump said that he and Putin had “discussed the attack on Russia’s docked airplanes, by Ukraine and also various other attacks that have been taking place by both sides”. “It was a go...

Russia and Ukraine on Monday swapped plans for ending their three-year war during talks in Istanbul aiming to find a way out of Europe’s largest conflict since World War II. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said any deal must not “reward” Russian leader Vladimir Putin, but said Kyiv was willing to take the “necessary steps for peace”. Urged on by US President Donald Trump, Moscow and Kyiv have opened direct negotiations for the first time since the early weeks of Russia’s invasion, but have yet to make progress towards an agreement. Monday’s talks come a day after Ukraine carried out one of its most brazen and successful attacks ever on Russian soil — using drones to hit dozens of strategic bombers parked at airbases thousands of kilometres behind the front line. A first round of meetings in Istanbul last month yielded a large-scale prisoner exchange but no pause in the fighting, which has raged since Russia invaded in February 2022. On Monday, the delegations “exchanged documents through the Turkish si...

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday said Vladimir Putin was “playing with fire” by refusing to engage in ceasefire talks with Kyiv as Russian forces made gains in Ukraine’s northeast. With his frustration increasing, Trump has lashed out at the Russian president as Moscow has hit Ukraine with some of the three-year-old war’s deadliest drone […]

Russia and Ukraine each exchanged 307 of their service personnel on Saturday on the second day of an extended prisoner swap set to be the largest in the three-year war. U.S. President Donald Trump has suggested the swap – which should see 1,000 prisoners released on each side over three days – could herald a new phase in […]

Ukraine will ask the European Union next week to consider big new steps to isolate Moscow, including seizing Russian assets and bringing in sanctions for some buyers of Russian oil, as United States President Donald Trump has backed off from tightening sanctions. A previously unreported Ukrainian white paper to be presented to the EU calls for the 27-member bloc to take a more aggressive and independent position on sanctions as uncertainty hangs over Washington’s future role. Among 40 pages of recommendations were calls to adopt legislation that would speed up the EU’s seizure of assets from sanctioned individuals and send them to Ukraine. Those under sanctions could then seek compensation from Russia. The EU should consider a range of steps to make its sanctions apply more forcefully beyond its own territory, including targeting foreign companies that use its technology to help Russia, and “the introduction of secondary sanctions on purchasers of Russian oil”. Such secondary sanctions, which could hit big bu...

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday that Russia and Ukraine “will immediately start negotiations” toward a ceasefire and an end to their three-year-old war, speaking after he held a call with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. “Negotiations between Russia and Ukraine will begin immediately,” Trump said in a Truth Social post following his call with […]