Latest news with #peaceTalks
Free Malaysia Today
6 hours ago
- General
- Free Malaysia Today
Russia says no response from Ukraine on Istanbul talks
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called Kyiv's demand 'non-constructive'. (Kremlin pool/EPA Images pic) MOSCOW : Russia on Thursday said it was still waiting for Ukraine to say whether it would attend peace talks in Istanbul on Monday, after Kyiv demanded Moscow send its peace terms before agreeing to the meeting. Diplomatic efforts to end the three-year conflict have gained pace in recent months, but Moscow has shown no signs of easing its bombardment of Ukraine while rebuffing calls for an immediate ceasefire. Moscow has offered to hold a second round of direct talks with Ukraine in Istanbul on June 2, where it wants to present a so-called 'memorandum' outlining its conditions for a long-term peace settlement. But, Ukraine said the meeting would not yield results unless it saw a copy of the memorandum in advance, a proposal that the Kremlin dismissed. 'As far as I know, no response has been received yet… we need to wait for a response from the Ukrainian side,' Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, calling Kyiv's demand that Russia provide peace conditions up front as 'non-constructive'. Ukraine said it had already submitted its peace terms to Russia and demanded Moscow do the same. Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on Russia and Ukraine not to 'shut the door' on dialogue ahead of the anticipated meeting in Istanbul. The warring sides previously met in Istanbul on May 16, their first direct talks in over three years. Those talks failed to yield a breakthrough, but the two sides did agree to trade 1,000 prisoners each – their biggest POW swap since the beginning of the conflict. Erdogan's foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, who met Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Monday, was expected to travel to Kyiv on Thursday to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. US President Donald Trump, who has been pushing for a peace deal, has become increasingly frustrated with Moscow's apparent stalling and warned on Wednesday he would determine within 'about two weeks' whether Putin was serious about ending the fighting. Moscow's offensive, launched in Feb 2022, has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and the destruction of large parts of eastern and southern Ukraine. Attacks go on Ukraine, on Thursday, criticised Russia's refusal to provide the memorandum. 'The Russians' fear of sending their memorandum to Ukraine suggests that it is likely filled with unrealistic ultimatums,' foreign ministry spokesman Georgiy Tykhy said. The Kremlin has been grinding forward on the battlefield for over a year while pushing its demands for peace, which include Ukraine abandoning its Nato ambitions and ceding territory it already controls. Local authorities in Ukraine said Thursday that Russia had fired 90 drones overnight, killing at least five people across the country. In southern Ukraine, a drone strike killed two civilians in the Kherson region, while a ballistic missile attack claimed the life of a farm worker in the Mykolaiv region. In the eastern Donetsk region, shelling killed one civilian, according to a 24-hour tally from the National Police. A 68-year-old man was killed by a drone strike on his home in the northeastern Sumy region, which borders Russia. In his comments on Wednesday, Trump told reporters he was 'very disappointed' at Russia's deadly bombardment during the negotiating process, but rebuffed calls to impose more sanctions on Moscow. Kyiv has accused Russia of deliberately stalling the peace process to pursue its offensive. Zelensky said Russia was 'amassing' more than 50,000 troops on the front line around Sumy, where Moscow's army has captured a number of settlements as it seeks to establish what Putin has called a 'buffer zone' inside Ukrainian territory. On Thursday, the Russian army said it captured three villages in the Donetsk and Kharkiv regions and had repelled 48 Ukrainian drones, including three over the Moscow region. A retired Russian commander who led air strikes on the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol died in a blast early Thursday in Stavropol in southern Russia, authorities said, adding that they did not rule out Ukrainian involvement.
Telegraph
9 hours ago
- Business
- Telegraph
Flattery and sleight of hand: The art of managing President Trump
Marco Rubio, the US foreign secretary, had a dilemma. Peace talks were fast approaching in London last month but Ukraine had signalled it was not ready to accept Washington's proposal to end the war. So he pulled out of the talks, leaving negotiations to more junior officials. Better that than having to return to Washington and report his failure to Donald Trump, his quixotic boss. 'Fundamentally, he didn't come to London, because what they understood the Ukrainians were bringing to London was something that he would not be able to sell back in the White House, so there was no point in him coming,' a source with knowledge of the negotiations said. 'He made it pretty clear when explaining the reasoning behind his decision for not attending with the foreign secretary.' It is just one of the ways that Cabinet officials, advisers and aides are managing the president, killing off dubious ideas or keeping themselves out of the firing line. The result is a surprisingly stable White House. Where Trump 1.0 was marked by leaks, infighting and dismissals, this time around, disagreements have mostly played out quietly behind the scenes. No one has played the game better than Mr Rubio, who has seen his stock rise to the point where he is talked of as a potential 2028 runner. Peter Navarro has watched it all from his palatial office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door to the White House. He is one of the few survivors of Mr Trump's first term and confided there was little secret to getting along with the president. 'Basically, you help president Trump fulfil his vision,' he previously told The Telegraph. 'Never take the credit. Be willing to take the blame.' However, insiders have worked out a string of tricks to gently bring Mr Trump around to their way of thinking. And Mr Navarro himself has ended up on the wrong side of such strategies. He was one of the key architects behind 'liberation day' when Mr Trump unveiled swingeing tariffs on goods imported around the world. The immediate impact was to plunge markets into free-fall, spooking key Trump administration figures who sensed a political bloodbath. So when Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, and Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, hatched a plan to urge Mr Trump to think again, they knew they needed to keep Mr Navarro as far away as possible. They made sure they met the president when the hawkish trade adviser had his own meeting elsewhere in the White House and was away from Mr Trump's ear. It is a feature, not a flaw, of Mr Trump's style of management, say those that know him well, as he enjoys the spectacle of staffers fighting it out to influence policy. It is a divide-and-conquer approach to team building, said Barbara Res, who described her 18 years at the Trump Organisation in a memoir Tower of Lies. 'He will pit two people against each other and divide them, instead of allowing them to join forces in a disagreement with him or complain about him,' she said. 'And he likes to see them fight and see who comes out on top.' She even described how he pitted his own ex-wife, Ivana, against a Trump Organisation employee on rival redevelopments in Atlantic City during the 1990s to see who would do best. Trump 2.0 is different from Trump 1.0. Then Mr Trump's administration was built from scratch, in the days after his shock election win, drawing on members of the Republican Party establishment, Wall Street and the armed forces. They did not make easy bedfellows and the first tranche of memoirs from that time revealed all sorts of tricks used by officials to build guardrails around an unpredictable and inexperienced president. A book by political insider Bob Woodward described how Gary Cohn, Mr Trump's chief economic adviser, was so disturbed by plans to end a free trade agreement with South Korea that he simply removed a draft letter from the president's desk before he could sign it. 'Working inside the White House with him was like living inside a pinball machine,' is how one former staffer put it. John Bolton, Mr Trump's third national security adviser in his first administration, said he found much of his job was simply trying to keep the policy process on track. 'People found out that if they just happened to be the last person to talk to him, as likely as not, they would get the outcome they wanted,' he told The Telegraph. 'Well, of course, the whole National Security Council process is intended to prevent that from happening.' He lasted 18 months in office and is today one of the figures most hated by Mr Trump and his allies. This time around, the president has built an administration of loyalists who stayed close to him through four years in the political wilderness. Much of the policy comes directly from trusted advisers such as Stephen Miller. And last Friday, officials took an axe to the NSC, firing 100 officials, and concentrating decision-making in the hands of a few senior directors. Even so, some of the same rules that applied the first time around still stand. Keep memos brief. Make them graphic. Be the first to arrive with good news. Get yourself on TV as much as possible. And things work best if it sounds like the idea has come from Mr Trump himself. 'Try something like, do you remember that day we were talking about blah, blah, blah, and you said we should stop doing that thing,' said a former aide to Mr Trump. 'first he'll say, 'No, I never said that.' 'Then you come back with well, we were all very surprised and in awe of you taking that position. And eventually he'll say, 'Yeah I guess I did do that.' Other Trump allies take a dim view of the tactics. 'I don't fall in the list of people that try to manipulate him, so I don't need a strategy,' said Marjorie Taylor Greene, the hardline congresswoman and staunch Trump ally. 'I'm real with him. And he's pretty smart about who he's dealing with.'
Associated Press
11 hours ago
- General
- Associated Press
A Russian missile strike kills a child and injures another, a Ukrainian official says
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A Russian missile hit a front-line region in Ukraine on Saturday, killing a child and injuring another, a Ukrainian official said as uncertainty remains as to whether Kyiv diplomats will attend a new round of peace talks proposed by Moscow for early next week in Istanbul. Russian troops launched some 109 drones and five missiles across Ukraine overnight and into Saturday, the Ukrainian air force said. Three of the missiles and 42 drones were destroyed by air defenses, while another 30 drones failed to reach their targets without causing damage, it said. A 9-old girl was killed in a strike on the front-line village of Dolynka in the Zaporizhzhia region, and a 16-year-old was injured, Zaporizhzhia's Gov. Ivan Fedorov said. 'One house was destroyed. The shockwave from the blast also damaged several other houses, cars, and outbuildings,' Fedorov wrote on Telegram. Moscow did not comment on the latest attack. Meanwhile, 14 people were injured after Ukrainian drones struck apartment buildings on Saturday in the Russian town of Rylsk and the village of Artakovo in the western Kursk region, local acting Gov. Alexander Khinshtein said. Four children were among those injured in the two attacks, which also sparked several fires, he said. On Friday, Andrii Yermak, a top adviser to Ukraine's president said Kyiv was ready to resume direct peace talks with Russia in Istanbul on Monday but that the Kremlin should provide a promised memorandum setting out its position on ending the more than three-year war, before the two delegations sit down to negotiate. Speaking late Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Russia was 'undermining diplomacy' by withholding the document. 'For some reason, the Russians are concealing this document. This is an absolutely bizarre position. There is no clarity about the format,' Zelenskyy wrote on Telegram. Moscow previously said it would share its memorandum during the talks. ___ Follow AP's coverage of the war in Ukraine at
Yahoo
11 hours ago
- General
- Yahoo
A Russian missile strike kills a child and injures another, a Ukrainian official says
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A Russian missile hit a front-line region in Ukraine on Saturday, killing a child and injuring another, a Ukrainian official said as uncertainty remains as to whether Kyiv diplomats will attend a new round of peace talks proposed by Moscow for early next week in Istanbul. Russian troops launched some 109 drones and five missiles across Ukraine overnight and into Saturday, the Ukrainian air force said. Three of the missiles and 42 drones were destroyed by air defenses, while another 30 drones failed to reach their targets without causing damage, it said. A 9-old girl was killed in a strike on the front-line village of Dolynka in the Zaporizhzhia region, and a 16-year-old was injured, Zaporizhzhia's Gov. Ivan Fedorov said. 'One house was destroyed. The shockwave from the blast also damaged several other houses, cars, and outbuildings,' Fedorov wrote on Telegram. Moscow did not comment on the latest attack. Meanwhile, 14 people were injured after Ukrainian drones struck apartment buildings on Saturday in the Russian town of Rylsk and the village of Artakovo in the western Kursk region, local acting Gov. Alexander Khinshtein said. Four children were among those injured in the two attacks, which also sparked several fires, he said. On Friday, Andrii Yermak, a top adviser to Ukraine's president said Kyiv was ready to resume direct peace talks with Russia in Istanbul on Monday but that the Kremlin should provide a promised memorandum setting out its position on ending the more than three-year war, before the two delegations sit down to negotiate. Speaking late Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Russia was 'undermining diplomacy' by withholding the document. 'For some reason, the Russians are concealing this document. This is an absolutely bizarre position. There is no clarity about the format,' Zelenskyy wrote on Telegram. Moscow previously said it would share its memorandum during the talks. ___ Follow AP's coverage of the war in Ukraine at
The Independent
11 hours ago
- General
- The Independent
A Russian missile strike kills a child and injures another, a Ukrainian official says
A Russian missile hit a front-line region in Ukraine on Saturday, killing a child and injuring another, a Ukrainian official said as uncertainty remains as to whether Kyiv diplomats will attend a new round of peace talks proposed by Moscow for early next week in Istanbul. Russian troops launched some 109 drones and five missiles across Ukraine overnight and into Saturday, the Ukrainian air force said. Three of the missiles and 42 drones were destroyed by air defenses, while another 30 drones failed to reach their targets without causing damage, it said. A 9-old girl was killed in a strike on the front-line village of Dolynka in the Zaporizhzhia region, and a 16-year-old was injured, Zaporizhzhia's Gov. Ivan Fedorov said. 'One house was destroyed. The shockwave from the blast also damaged several other houses, cars, and outbuildings,' Fedorov wrote on Telegram. Moscow did not comment on the latest attack. Meanwhile, 14 people were injured after Ukrainian drones struck apartment buildings on Saturday in the Russian town of Rylsk and the village of Artakovo in the western Kursk region, local acting Gov. Alexander Khinshtein said. Four children were among those injured in the two attacks, which also sparked several fires, he said. On Friday, Andrii Yermak, a top adviser to Ukraine's president said Kyiv was ready to resume direct peace talks with Russia in Istanbul on Monday but that the Kremlin should provide a promised memorandum setting out its position on ending the more than three-year war, before the two delegations sit down to negotiate. Speaking late Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Russia was 'undermining diplomacy' by withholding the document. 'For some reason, the Russians are concealing this document. This is an absolutely bizarre position. There is no clarity about the format,' Zelenskyy wrote on Telegram. Moscow previously said it would share its memorandum during the talks. ___
