𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Russia’s UN ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, has accused Ukraine of ignoring the ceasefire and carrying out around 120 strikes, as leaders met behind closed doors at the UN Security Council.

The session was called yesterday at Russia’s request over the energy infrastructure truce.

“Ukrainian forces have largely disregarded it, launching attacks on Russia’s fuel and energy infrastructure on a daily basis,” Mr Nebenzia told reporters after the meeting.

In a joint statement after the talks — read by Slovenia’s UN ambassador, Samuel Zbogar — Slovenia, Denmark, France, Greece, and Britain urged Russia to agree to a full and unconditional ceasefire.

“Ukraine wants peace, and has demonstrated this by agreeing to a full, immediate and unconditional ceasefire five weeks ago,” Mr Zbogar said.

“At the consultations today, Russia again rejected the comprehensive ceasefire and refused to make its first step towards peace.”

According to Pew’s poll, Americans who said Russia is the US’s “enemy” have fallen to 50 per cent, down from 61 per cent in April 2024 and 70 per cent in March 2022, just after the invasion’s start.

Among Republicans specifically, only 40 per cent saw Russia as an enemy, which is down from 58 per cent last year and 69 per cent in March 2022. Only 34 per cent of Americans overall now describe Russia as a competitor to the US, and only 9 per cent describe it as a “partner.”

Ukraine and the US could sign the minerals and economic cooperation deal they’ve been negotiating as soon as next week, president Donald Trump said yesterday

“We have a minerals deal, which I guess is going to be signed on Thursday (next week),” Mr Trump told reporters at the White House, in an apparent reference to the US-Ukraine deal.

Sitting alongside Mr Trump in the Oval Office yesterday, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said “we’re still working on the details” and that the signing could come by next Friday.

“It’s substantially what we’d agreed on previously,” he said. “When the president was here, we had a memorandum of understanding. We went straight to the big deal, and I think it’s an 80-page agreement and that’s what we’ll be signing.”

Mr Trump has pushed for a compact that would allow the United States to have privileged access to Ukraine’s natural resources and critical minerals in what he casts as repayment for military aid provided by Washington to Ukraine under the previous presidency of Joe Biden.

Soon after the massacre in Sumy, where two Iskander missiles slammed into the provincial Ukrainian capital killing 35 people, including two children, Trump sloughed off the atrocity by claiming it had been a Russian mistake. Shocking, but not surprising, as Trump has consistently taken the Russian side at every opportunity this year.

“When you start a war, you got to know you can win,” he said of Ukraine’s leader.

Russia has reduced the number of its strikes on Ukrainian energy facilities but is attacking civilian infrastructure instead, Volodymyr Zelensky has said.

Mr Zelensky told a press conference in Kyiv yesterday that, overall, Russia was launching the same number of missiles and drones at Ukraine as it had before the ceasefire.

“They reduced their strikes on energy. That’s a fact,” Mr Zelensky said.

“But I wanted us to pay attention to this – Russia did not reduce the number of strikes, that was the strategy… by reducing (strikes on) energy, they are hitting other civilian infrastructure,” he said.

Russia and Ukraine agreed last month to a US-brokered, 30-day moratorium on military strikes against energy infrastructure, but both sides have frequently accused each other of violating it.

Just days ago, Putin’s forces targeted the city centre in back-to-back missile strikes, killing 35 people and injuring over 100. It marked the deadliest attack on Ukrainian civilians this year.

Neighbours chatted in their apartment blocks, watching children play games in the courtyards. Pausing to look up, they would see the buzzing of attack drones and the familiar sounds of Ukrainian air defences before going back to their strange routine which is quickly becoming usual.

Volodymyr Zelensky accused the US special envoy Steve Witkoff of “spreading Russian narratives” about the war in Ukraine and overstepping his position.

“I believe Mr Witkoff has adopted the strategy of the Russian side. Consciously or not, he is spreading Russian narratives,” he said at a press briefing in Kyiv yesterday.

“Either way, it does not help. And I do not see any mandate for him to speak about Ukrainian territories. These lands belong to our people, to our nation, and to the future generations of Ukrainians,” Mr Zelensky said.

The Ukrainian president has said the country will not negotiate its territory as he dismissed Mr Witkoff’s recent remarks of Ukraine’s sovereign land.

Mr Witkoff had tol Fox News earlier this week that a potential peace deal could centre on the status of five territories, without naming the five Ukrainian regions – Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – held by Russia.

“As I said, we are discussing an unconditional ceasefire – and until that happens, we are not discussing territories,” Mr Zelensky said. “You know my position and our red lines: we will not recognise any of our temporarily occupied territories as Russian,” he said.

Ukrainian officials announced they have signed an outline of a minerals deal with the US and said a final accord could be reached by the end of next week.

Ukrainian economy minister, Yulia Svyrydenko, took to X and shared photos of her and US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, signing the outline of the preliminary minerals deal separately.

“We are happy to announce the signing, with our American partners, of a Memorandum of Intent, which paves the way for an Economic Partnership Agreement and the establishment of the Investment Fund for the Reconstruction of Ukraine,” she said on X.

The Ukrianian minister said that the signed document “notes the desire of the American people to invest together with the Ukrainian people in a free, sovereign, and secure Ukraine”.

“We believe that Chinese representatives are engaged in the production of some weapons on the territory of Russia,” he told reporters in Kyiv.

He did not specify whether he meant artillery systems or shells.

The allegation is likely to further strain relations between Kyiv and Beijing following the capture of Chinese nationals fighting for Russia. China has so far tried to maintain an outward perception of neutrality in the three-year war prompted by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.