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European leaders say peace talks ‘at a critical moment’ for Ukraine and security of Euro-Atlantic region
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Donald Trump says he and European leaders exchanged “pretty strong words” on a call discussing his proposal to end the Ukraine war.
Sir Keir Starmer, France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Friedrich Merz spoke with Trump late on Wednesday, and said afterwards that it was a “critical moment for Ukraine, its people and for shared security across the Euro-Atlantic region”.
Trump also said Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky “has to be realistic” about his country’s position on a peace plan, and said the US will “make a determination depending on what they come back with”.
The French government said Ukraine’s allies – the Coalition of the Willing – will discuss the negotiations today by video call. Territorial gains, post-war reconstruction and economic development will be among the subjects on the table.
The Trump administration was earlier reported to be pressuring Kyiv into agreeing a rapid peace deal with Russia, with the US president setting a Christmas deadline for an end to the fighting.
During a two-hour call, US envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner are said to have told Zelensky the president wants to see a peace deal agreed within weeks.
The Trump’s administration’s new National Security Strategy shows that America understands Europe’s “civilisational-scale decline”, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban wrote on X on Thursday.
In the document, Trump called on the United States to reassess its relationship with Europe, a continent which faces “civilizational erasure” and must change course.
The document caused shock across Europe, but Orban, a long-time Trump ally, called it “the most important and most interesting document of recent years”.
He said it showed Washington had grasped that Europe reached an “economic dead end” and that its values, democracy and free market were all in danger.
Orban also said the US administration understood that Europe needed to rebuild its relationship with Russia “at a strategic level”.
“America has a precise understanding of Europe’s decline. They see the civilisational-scale decline that we in Hungary have been fighting against for fifteen years. At last, we are not fighting against it alone,” he said.
Moscow has accused Poland of “legal tyranny” following the arrest of a Russian archaeologist at Ukraine’s arrest.
Alexander Butyagin, an employee of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, was detained on arrival in Warsaw, according to Russia’s foreign ministry.
The ministry said Butyagin was accused by Kyiv of “destroying cultural heritage” while carrying out archaelogical excavations in Russian occupied Crimea, but contended that the allegation was absurd. The archaeologist had been invited to deliver a number of lectures in European cities.
“This is absolute legal tyranny,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
“We will of course demand through diplomatic channels the right to protect the interests of our citizen.”
German chancellor Friedrich Merz said he expects talks with US officials to take place this weekend, discussing a proposal put forward by the European side for peace in Ukraine.
In a call on Wednesday, “we made a proposal to [Donald Trump] that we would finalise the documents together with the American government over the weekend,” Mr Merz said.
“If we now proceed with this process as we envisage, there will be talks with the American government over the weekend,” he added at a press conference with Nato secretary general Mark Rutte.
Russia is open to foreign investment, the Kremlin said on Thursday, following reports that Donald Trumps’ Ukraine peace plan included major proposals to invest in Russia rare earths and energy.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the plans were detailed in appendices to peace proposals handed to European counterparts over recent weeks.
They include a plan to restore Russian energy flows to Europe and for U.S. financial firms and other businesses to tap $200 billion of frozen Russian sovereign assets for projects in Ukraine, the paper said.
Russia, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, was interested in foreign investment. When asked about the US frozen asset proposals reported by the Journal, Peskov declined comment.
Russian forces took control of the village of Lyman in Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv region, state news agencies cited the Defence Ministry as saying on Thursday.
The Independent could not independently verify the battlefield reports.
Moscow’s forces have continued advancing forwards on the Ukrainian frontline, as US mediators work to hash out a deal between the two countries.
Dramatic footage has captured the moment the Ukrainian Security Service blew up an oil tanker from Russia’s ‘shadow fleet’ using naval drones in its latest attack on Moscow’s oil exports.
The Comoros-flagged Dashan was sailing through Ukraine’s exclusive economic zone in the Black Sea towards the Russian port city of Novorossiysk when it was attacked by agents from the SBU.
The ship had its automatic identification system switched off at the time of the strike, an SBU source said.
The strike on Wednesday is the third attack in two weeks on the Russian ‘shadow fleet’ of unregulated ships which help Moscow to export oil around the world – a central component of their wartime economy.
Read the full report:
Ukrainian drones hit a Russian oil rig in the Caspian sea for the first time, a source in Ukraine’s SBU security service said according to Reuters.
The drones struck the Filanovsky oil rig, which belongs to Russian oil major Lukoil. At least four strikes were recorded on the target.
The strikes halted the facility’s extraction of oil and gas, the source said.
Lukoil did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday that a visit to Moscow this month by Trump envoy Steve Witkoff had helped bring Moscow and Washington closer togather on certain issues.
The Kremlin said at the time that Russia and the US did not reach a compromise on a possible peace deal to end the war in Ukraine, after the marathon five-hour Kremlin talks between Vladimir Putin, Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law.
Lavrov added that Moscow had handed over Russia’s proposals on collective security guarantees to Washington.
Read everything you need to know about Donald Trump’s latest comments in just five bullet points with The Independent’s Bulletin…
Ukraine last night officially handed over its point-by-point response to the latest US peace plan, according to a report in Axios.
Donald Trump has intensified the pressure on Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky to accept a peace plan conceding major territorial losses for Ukraine.
Zelensky’s national security advisor and chief negotiator Rustem Umerov has now forwarded the Ukrainian response to Jared Kushner, Trump’s advisor and son-in-law.
The response includes comments and proposed ideas to “make the whole thing doable”, according to a Ukrainian official.
This follows days of consultations with European allies, including with Keir Starmer and the French president Emmanuel Macron and the German chancellor Friedrich Merz, who held a phone call with Trump on Wednesday.
A virtual meeting between the US and Ukraine is expected to take place on Thursday to continue discussions on the peace plan, a Ukrainian official said.
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