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Trump doesn’t ‘like the bombing’ and has called on Moscow to stop, after 20 were killed in a devastating strike on Kryvyi Rih
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A Ukrainian team will visit Washington this week for crunch talks on a minerals deal, the first visit since the deal collapsed in dramatic fashion five weeks ago.
Volodymyr Zelensky was set to sign a framework agreement in late February before he was booted out of the White House, when a furious Donald Trump berated the Ukrainian president for not being thankful enough for US war assistance.
Since then, teams from Kyiv and Washington have been working to hash out a revised agreement – and to rebuild a broken relationship.
Washington has proposed a more expansive minerals deal which could give it access to valuable mineral resources, including titanium, lithium, and uranium, according to economy minister Yuliia Svyrydenko.
But the deal has not yet been agreed by Ukraine and it is unclear exactly how close the two sides are to reaching an agreement.
Meanwhile, Mr Trump has urged Russia to stop bombing Ukraine, after a ballistic missile strike in Kryvyi Rih killed 20, including nine children.,
“We are talking to Russia. We would like them to stop,” Trump told reporters onboard Air Force One. “I don’t like the bombing, the bombing goes on and on, and every week thousands of young people being killed.”
Ukraine attacked Russian energy infrastructure six times over the previous day, its defence ministry has claimed, despite a US-brokered halt to such strikes.
Both Kyiv and Moscow have accused each other of breaching a US-brokered halt to such strikes in recent weeks.
Russia said Ukraine struck power facilities and electrical substations in Russia’s Rostov, Voronezh and Bryansk regions, as well as in the Ukrainian regions of Kherson and Donetsk, parts of which Moscow controls.
The Independent was not able to verify reports of the strikes.
As he looks to solidify his territorial gains in Ukraine in a potential ceasefire deal, Russian president Vladimir Putin has one eye trained on Russia’s southern border – and boosting Russian influence in Central Asia.
Following his 2024 re-election, Putin made Uzbekistan his third foreign visit after China and Belarus. The visit signalled the region’s continued importance to Moscow.
In response to Western sanctions on Moscow over the Ukraine war, trade and investment between Russia and Central Asian countries have grown significantly.
Russia’s Lukoil and Gazprom are now the dominant foreign players in Uzbekistan’s energy fields. In Kazakhstan, Moscow controls a quarter of the country’s uranium production.
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EU finance ministers will discuss setting up a defence fund to buy and own defence equipment, and charge members a fee for its use, a paper prepared for the ministers’ discussions showed.
The paper, drafted by the Bruegel think tank, was commissioned by the Polish presidency of the EU and could generate large defence funding without boosting national public debt levels – a worry of many high-debt countries.
The paper is part of an EU discussion on how to finance preparations against a potential attack from Russia as European governments realise they can no longer fully rely on the United States for their security.
The EU has denied funding to Estonia and Lithuania for a cross-border “drone wall” which would enhance surveillance and security against the threats to their eastern borders, LRT reported on Monday.
Proposed in May 2023 by the Lithuanian Interior Minister, the initiative sought to create a system which could detect and destroy drones along the borders with Russia and Belarus.
The initiative later gained support from regional partners including Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Norway and Finland. But the EU has denied rejected the application for 12 million euros in funding, Lithuanian officials said.
The Kremlin said earlier on Monday that there can be no ceasefire until Russia’s questions have been answered.
Kyiv and its allies have accused Moscow of deliberately delaying a ceasefire without any genuinely reason, as it looks to seize more territory before sitting around the negotiation table.
“President Putin does support the idea of the need for a ceasefire, but before that a number of questions must be answered,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters earlier today.
“These questions are still hanging in the air; so far no one has given an answer to them.”
Exactly what the questions consist of is not entirely clear, but Vladimir Putin has previously said that any peace agreement must address what Moscow sees as the root causes of the conflict: essentially a tug of war between Russia and the West over Ukraine’s future and the post-Soviet enlargement of NATO towards Russia’s borders.
He also said the ceasefire would have to ensure that Ukraine did not simply use it to regroup, and that key questions about verification of a truce would need to be clarified.
The Kremlin on Monday laid the blame for the lack of answers on Kyiv which it said was unable to control a number of its “extremist and nationalist units”.
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