“Those are things you don’t discuss”, Germany’s defence minister said about the EU chief’s comments on troops in Ukraine, after she claimed there are “pretty precise plans”. Meanwhile, Russia is accused of interfering with a plane carrying the EU Commission boss. Follow the latest below.
Monday 1 September 2025 20:08, UK
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John Healey is giving a statement on the Ukraine war to MPs.
The defence secretary is addressing efforts to bring Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table, following Donald Trump’s summit with him in Alaska a few weeks ago.
Despite Vladimir Putin suggesting he reached “understandings” with Donald Trump in Alaska over the path to peace in Ukraine, analysts believe the Russian leader escaped the meeting with the upper hand.
Ahead of the meeting, Trump threatened Moscow with “severe” sanctions unless it made serious steps to end the war.
But those sanctions never came, with Russia since ramping up its nightly attacks on Ukraine, killing 25 during one bombardment of Kyiv last week.
So, has Putin been playing Trump?
“Yes. Absolutely,” Russia’s former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov tells Sky News’ chief presenter Mark Austin.
“He continues conducting a war of attrition, believing that he will win. He still has some economic power because no additional pressure was imposed on him during the year.
“Putin understands this. That’s why he’ll continue to believe he’s on the right and that he’s winning.”
‘Everyone noticed Ukraine’s commission’
Putin is currently in China at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) economic summit – see the post below this for more on that.
It’s already been noted by Ukraine that the ongoing war was conspicuously left out of the summit’s declaration, which Kasyanov says is because a “consensus could not be achieved”.
He tells Austin the only real common value held by the various nations attending the SCO summit is an antipathy towards the US.
He said: “Everyone noticed that in the resolution of this high level summit, there was no mention of Ukraine at all. That’s because it’s absolutely clear that the consensus could not be achieved on this page.”
The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) is a 10-member political, economic and international security group which started off in 1996 to settle border disputes after the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended.
Originally named the Shanghai Five, it was formed by China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
It evolved in 2001, naming itself the SCO and including Uzbekistan.
India and Pakistan were part of its 2017 expansion, with Iran added in 2023 and Belarus in 2024.
It’s also got 14 key dialogue partners, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey.
Not far off half of the world’s population (roughly 43%) is represented by the members, as is nearly a quarter (about 23%) of the globe’s economic output as measured by gross domestic product (GDP).
It meets annually, makes decisions by consensus and is having its largest-ever summit now.
By Dominic Waghorn, international affairs editor
Chinese, Russian and Indian leaders hope their meeting in Beijing this week projects unity and helps usher in a new world order.
They want to offer an alternative to American superpower hegemony. And with Donald Trump taking a wrecking ball to the old world order, they believe this is their moment.
But don’t get carried away. Much of this is kabuki theatre, long on posture and shorter on substance.
Take Russian leader Vladimir Putin. He hopes the event puts Russia on a par with China in the eyes of the world, in turn validating his war in Ukraine and propping up his standing back home.
But in reality, Russia is on the way to becoming a vassal state to Beijing. Trade between the two countries has shot up by two thirds since the start of the Ukraine war, most of it on China’s terms.
China gets Russian oil, on the cheap, because sanctions stop Putin selling it elsewhere and in return Russia buys a lot of Chinese goods. China has Russia over a barrel, literally, and is taking full advantage.
China’s leader Xi Jinping says the trio should see themselves as “partners, not rivals”. But Indian leader Narendra Modi knows economic frictions between the two countries and border disputes undermine all that.
And then there’s tension between China and Russia over North Korea. North Korea is on Chinese turf, in mafia terms, but Putin has been muscling in, increasingly cosy with the hermit kingdom’s leader Kim Jong Un.
So the threesome bromance flowering this week is not all that it seems. There are cracks that a competent US administration could seek to exploit.
The one winner
The Trump team may not do so based on current form. It is letting the Ukraine war continue instead of applying the kind of pressure on Russia its allies believe will bring it to an end.
The longer the war goes on, the stronger the ties between Moscow, Beijing and Pyongyang. And the more divisions, it seems, in the Western alliance.
Instead of courting the only democracy in the troika, India, Trump has worked hard to alienate, imposing 50% tariffs.
The one winner in all this is China, the rising power the Trump administration says it’s most worried about.
Xi Jinping may say he wants a multipolar world. In reality, he wants the world re-ordered to suit Chinese interests. And nothing this week will deter him from pursuing that end.
Sergei Lavrov has made some thinly veiled comments on what he believes is the main result of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in China.
For Russia’s foreign minister, “the determination to defend one’s rights without giving in to provocations, in full compliance with international law” has been a key theme of the summit.
Lavrov continued: “This determination, the focus on defending, I emphasise once again, one’s legitimate interests, it is evident. This is probably the main result.”
Vladimir Putin has often claimed defending Russia from an eastwardly-expanding NATO is among the reasons for launching his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
There is no explicit mention of Russia’s three-year war in Ukraine in the SCO summit declaration, a decision which the foreign ministry in Kyiv has called “surprising”.
Robert Fico will hold bilateral meetings with Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin in Beijing this week, the Slovakian leader has announced.
He will be in attendance at the Second World War anniversary celebrations in the Chinese capital.
Fico will then meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in eastern Slovakia on Friday, he said in a statement.
Vladimir Putin is certainly keeping busy during his four-day visit to China.
The first half of the trip is filled with meetings at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in the city of Tianjin.
The pictures below show the Russian leader during meetings with India’s Narendra Modi, Turkey’s Tayyip Erdogan, Vietnam’s Pham Minh Chinh, Tajikistan’s Emomali Rahmon and Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian.
Russia has denied involvement in the failure of GPS navigation systems on the plane carrying EU chief Ursula von der Leyen during her trip to Bulgaria yesterday.
“Your information is incorrect,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told the Financial Times, after reports said the pilots had to rely on paper maps to land safely at Plovdiv airport.
An EU spokesperson told Sky News: “We have received information from Bulgarian authorities that they suspect this blatant interference was carried out by Russia.”
Volodymyr Zelenskyy says the latest delivery of air defence systems to Ukraine is being accelerated to shield the country from Russia’s huge missile and drone attacks.
Moscow launched one of its most intense overnight attacks of the war on Ukraine last week, with at least 25 killed in Kyiv on Thursday.
“We are accelerating the supply of additional air defence systems to enhance protection against missiles,” Zelenskyy wrote on X.
“We count on the maximum efforts of Ukrainian diplomats in their contacts with partners.”
Zelenskyy said he had instructed the head of Ukraine’s security council to procure more short and medium-range systems and increase funding for drone manufacturers.
Here’s a look at the latest battlefield maps of Ukraine.
Scroll through the maps to view different parts of the battlefield, including the situation in key regions such as Luhansk, Donetsk and Belgorod.
Vladimir Putin reportedly wants control of the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine – known as the Donbas – as a condition for ending the war.
Russia occupies around 19% of Ukraine, including Crimea and the parts of the Donbas region it seized before the full-scale invasion in February 2022.
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