Latest news with #DNIPROPETROVSK
Arab News
08-08-2025
- Politics
- Arab News
Trump says he will meet with Putin ‘very shortly' to discuss the war in Ukraine
DNIPROPETROVSK REGION, Ukraine: US President Donald Trump said Friday that he will meet 'very shortly' with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss the war in Ukraine and that he will announce the location soon.'We're going to be announcing later, and we're going to have a meeting with Russia,' Trump told reporters at the White comments came as Ukrainian soldiers on the battlefield expressed little hope for a diplomatic solution to the war and Trump's deadline arrived Friday for the Kremlin to make that Putin did not heed his calls to stop bombing Ukrainian cities, Trump almost two weeks ago moved up his ultimatum to impose additional sanctions on Russia and introduce secondary tariffs targeting countries that buy Russian oil if the Kremlin did not move toward a efforts to pressure Putin into stopping the fighting have so far delivered no progress. Russia's bigger army is slowly advancing deeper into Ukraine at great cost in troops and armor while it relentlessly bombards Ukrainian cities. Russia and Ukraine are far apart on their terms for troops say they are ready to keep fightingUkrainian forces are locked in intense battles along the 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line that snakes from northeast to southeast Ukraine. The Pokrovsk area of the eastern Donetsk region is taking the brunt of punishment as Russia seeks to break out into the neighboring Dnipropetrovsk region. Ukraine has significant manpower fighting is also taking place in Ukraine's northern Sumy border region, where Ukrainian forces are engaging Russian soldiers to prevent reinforcements being sent from there to the Pokrovsk area of Donetsk, a commander said he believes Moscow isn't interested in peace.'It is impossible to negotiate with them. The only option is to defeat them,' Buda, a commander of a drone unit in the Spartan Brigade, told The Associated Press. He used only his call sign, in keeping with the rules of the Ukrainian military.'I would like them to agree and for all this to stop, but Russia will not agree to that. It does not want to negotiate. So the only option is to defeat them,' he the southern Zaporizhzhia region, a howitzer commander using the call sign Warsaw, said troops are determined to thwart Russia's invasion.'We are on our land, we have no way out,' he said. 'So we stand our ground, we have no choice.'Putin makes a flurry of phone callsThe Kremlin said Friday that Putin had a phone call with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, during which the Russian leader informed Xi about the results of his meeting earlier this week with Trump envoy Steve Witkoff. Kremlin officials said Xi 'expressed support for the settlement of the Ukrainian crisis on a long-term basis.'Putin is due to visit China next month. China, along with North Korea and Iran, have provided military support for Russia's war effort, the US Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on X that he also had a call with Putin to speak about the latest Ukraine developments. Trump signed an executive order Wednesday to place an additional 25 percent tariff on India for its purchases of Russian oil, which the American president says is helping to finance Russia's calls followed his phone conversations with the leaders of South Africa, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Belarus, the Kremlin calls suggested to at least one analyst that Putin perhaps wanted to brief Russia's most important allies about a potential settlement that could be reached at a summit with Trump.'It means that some sort of real peace agreement has been reached for the first time,' said Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin Moscow-based say Putin is aiming to outlast the WestTrump said Thursday that he would meet with Putin even if the Russian leader will not meet with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky. That stoked fears in Europe that Ukraine could be sidelined in efforts to stop the continent's biggest conflict since World War comments followed a statement from Putin that he hoped to meet with Trump as early as next week, possibly in the United Arab Emirates. The White House said it was still working through the details of any potential Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank, said in an assessment Thursday that 'Putin remains uninterested in ending his war and is attempting to extract bilateral concessions from the United States without meaningfully engaging in a peace process.''Putin continues to believe that time is on Russia's side and that Russia can outlast Ukraine and the West,' it said.
Reuters
04-08-2025
- Politics
- Reuters
Ukraine bets big on interceptor drones as low-cost air shield
DNIPROPETROVSK REGION, Ukraine, Aug 4 (Reuters) - When President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said at the end of last month that Ukraine needs $6 billion to fund the production of interceptor drones, setting a target of 1,000 a day, he had his reasons. Having already reshaped the battlefield by doing work once reserved for long-range missiles, field artillery and human intelligence, drones are now fighting Russian drones - a boon for Ukraine's dwindling stock of air defence missile systems. In the last two months, just one Ukrainian charity supplying aerial interceptor drones says its devices have downed around 1,500 of the drones that Russia has been sending to reconnoitre the battlefield or to bomb Ukraine's towns and cities. Most importantly, such interceptors have the potential to be a cheap, plentiful alternative to using Western or Soviet-made air defence missiles, depleted by allies' inability, or reluctance, to replenish them. Colonel Serhiy Nonka's 1,129th air defence regiment, which started using them a year ago to ram and blow up enemy drones, estimated that they could down a Russian spotter drone at about a fifth of the cost of doing so with a missile. As a result, the depth to which these enemy reconnaissance drones can fly behind Ukrainian lines has decreased sharply, Nonka said. Some estimates put the interceptors' speed at over 300 kph (190 mph), although the precise figures are closely guarded. Other units are using interceptors to hit the long-range Shahed "kamikaze" drones that Russia launches at Kyiv and other cities, sometimes downing dozens a night, according to Zelenskiy. In the three and a half years since Russia invaded Ukraine at scale, drones have gone from an auxiliary tool to one of the primary means of waging war for both sides. To chase them down, interceptor drones need to be faster and more powerful than those that have already revolutionised long-range precision strikes and aerial reconnaissance. Like the First-Person View drones that now dominate the battlefield, interceptor drones are flown by a pilot on the ground through the video feed from an onboard camera. 'When we started to work (with these drones), the enemy would fly at 800 or a thousand metres," the officer who spearheaded their adoption by the 1,129th regiment, Oleksiy Barsuk. "Now it's three, four or five thousand – but their (camera) zoom is not infinite.' Most of the regiment's interceptor drones are provided by military charities that crowdfund weapons and equipment through donations from civilians. Taras Tymochko, from the largest of these, Come Back Alive, said it now supplies interceptors to 90 units. Since the project began a year ago, the organisation says over 3,000 drones have been downed by equipment it provided, nearly half of them in the last two months. However, such interceptors are still no match for incoming missiles or the fast jet-powered attack drones that Moscow has recently started deploying. The organisation reports the value of the downed Russian craft at $195 million, over a dozen times the cost of the drones and equipment handed over under the project. Sam Bendett, adjunct senior fellow at the Centre for a New American Security, said Russian forces were complaining about the effectiveness of large Ukrainian interceptors, but were also developing their own. 'We're starting to see more and more videos of various types of interceptions by both sides ... I think this is going to accelerate and it's going to become more and more ubiquitous in the coming weeks."
