Ukraine-Russia war latest: Nato ‘waiting for Trump’ over key decision as Putin’s planes ‘stole children’

The UK and France are inching closer to consider deploying troops to Ukraine to monitor a ceasefire should Kyiv and Moscow begin peace talks, a senior Nato official said on the condition of anonymity.

The official said Paris and London are looking at options for a variety of situations that can take place in Ukraine, reported Radio Free Europe. These discussions are not held within Nato structures but as between the respective national governments, the official said.

One of the options being considered would entail sending a task force of troops to the contact line to enforce an armistice, the report added.

A number of Nato members are waiting for the incoming US administration led by Donald Trump to take office before making up their minds on Ukraine’s request for an invitation to join the alliance, Latvia’s foreign minister said.

“In principle, we as political leaders have agreed that Ukraine will be a member,” Latvian foreign minister Baiba Braže told Reuters on the sidelines of the meeting.

“The issue is what conditions when, and obviously that is where the alliance has to come together. All allies, currently, everybody is waiting for the new US administration to start working, so I think that is one aspect that is said or unsaid, but it’s a reality,” he said.

Braže, a former senior Nato official, said Ukraine’s battle-hardened military would be an asset for Nato, and that her country would be in favour of inviting Ukraine to join if a decision was on the table.

“A number of countries don’t necessarily feel comfortable inviting a country at war to join Nato,” the minister said, adding: “We are more flexible.”

Kyiv has urged Nato foreign ministers to issue an invitation at a meeting in Brussels this week, but movement appears unlikely amid opposition from some capitals and the transition in Washington.

South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol has announced he will undo his dramatic declaration of martial law just hours after his military clashed with protesters outside parliament.

The short-lived decree, which opposition figures described as a coup, shocked South Korea as the president vowed to eliminate “anti-state” actors he accused of sympathising with communist North Korea.

After the edict late on Tuesday night, the military surrounded the National Assembly in Seoul and clashed with protesters outraged at the declaration.

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The Kremlin has said that a US decision to send another weapons package to Ukraine worth $725 million showed that the outgoing Biden administration was determined to throw oil on the fire of the war in Ukraine to ensure the conflict kept going.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the aid package would not change the situation on the frontline.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement on Monday that the new aid would include Stinger missiles, ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), and drones and land mines.

Asked about the aid package, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters: “The current administration is pursuing its goals, its consistent line is to keep this war from slowing down.

“The (Biden) administration is doing everything it can to further add fuel to the fire. At the same time, this and other aid packages cannot change the course of events, cannot affect the dynamics on the frontlines.”

The alleged deployment of North Korean soldiers to aid Russia’s war effort in Ukraine has prompted South Korea to warn that it could send military monitors as well as weapons to Kyiv.

South Korean foreign minister Cho Tae Yul said earlier this week that all options were on the table, but experts noted that Seoul was more likely to send a variety of military support short of soldiers.

The alleged presence of around 12,000 North Korean troops in Russia, reportedly under a defence treaty that Russian president Vladimir Putin signed with Korean leader Kim Jong Un earlier this year, has set off alarm bells on the Korean peninsula.

A top Russian official has said there are no grounds yet for negotiations on how to bring the war in Ukraine to an end.

“There are no grounds for negotiations yet,” the Kremlin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told the Izvestia newspaper, reiterating Moscow’s long-standing position on the talks.

“Many countries have declared their readiness to provide their territory... And we are grateful to all countries for such goodwill, including Qatar.”

Qatar has mediated several returns of Ukrainian children taken to Russia from the conflict zone since the start of the war. Thousands of civilians, the vast majority of them Ukrainians, have been killed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of the country in February 2022.

Valentina Matviyenko, speaker of the Federation Council, Russia’s upper house of parliament, said on Monday that there could be attempts to begin peace talks with Ukraine in 2025.

In late November, sources told Reuters that Russian president Vladimir Putin was open to discussing a ceasefire deal in Ukraine with Trump and could agree to freeze the conflict along the front line. Russian forces control about 20 per cent of Ukraine’s territory and have been advancing lately at the fastest pace since the early days of the war.

But the Kremlin has said repeatedly it will not negotiate with president Volodymyr Zelensky unless Ukraine renounces its ambition to join Nato and withdraws troops from territories now controlled by Russian troops.

Russian presidential aircraft and funds were used in a program that took children from occupied Ukrainian territories, stripped them of Ukrainian identity and placed them with Russian families, according to a report by Yale’s School of Public Health.

The US State Department-backed research, published yesterday, identified 314 Ukrainian children taken to Russia in the early months of the war in Ukraine as part of what it says was a systematic, Kremlin-funded program to “Russify” them.

In March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Russian president Vladimir Putin and his child rights’ commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, for the alleged war crime of deportation of Ukrainian children.

The new research, reported first by Reuters, offers details of the alleged deportation programme and individuals involved, including what its lead researcher said were new links to Putin.

The researcher, Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, said he was scheduled to present the findings to the UN security council today. The US holds the rotating presidency of the 15-member body this month.

Mr Raymond said the research offers evidence that would support additional charges by the ICC against Putin of “forcible transfer” of people from one national and ethnic group to another.

He further said the report proved “the deportation of Ukraine‘s children is part of a systematic, Kremlin-led program” to make them citizens of Russia.

Forcible transfer is a crime against humanity under international law. Because they must be widespread and systematic, crimes against humanity are considered more serious than war crimes.

Russia’s air defence units were trying to repel a Ukrainian drone attack on Novorossiisk, the head of the Russian Black Sea port said this morning.

Novorossiisk is one of Russia’s most important oil export gateways.

“Air defence is operating in Novorossiisk,” Andrei Kravchenko, the head of the Novorossiisk municipality, said on his Telegram messaging channel. “All emergency services have been put on combat alert.”