Ukraine-Russia war live: Trump envoy rejects Starmer peace plan as ‘posture and pose’ ahead of Saudi talks

The fate of currently Russia-occupied Ukrainian territory will be one of the key areas of discussion at the talks in Saudi Arabia today.

Russian forces have illegally occupied one-fifth of Ukraine since they launched the full-scale military invasion over three years ago.

Trump's national security adviser Mike Waltz was asked yesterday if the US would accept a peace deal in which Russia was allowed to keep Ukrainian territory.

He replied: "We have to ask ourselves, is it in our national interest? Is it realistic?... Are we going to drive every Russian off of every inch of Ukrainian soil?"

Ukraine says it already recognises that it cannot recapture some occupied Ukrainian territory by force and that it will have to be returned diplomatically over time.

Kyiv says, however, that it will never recognise Russian sovereignty over Ukrainian territory.

US officials are due to meet negotiators from Ukraine and from Russia in Saudi Arabia today to discuss the details of a proposed 30-day ceasefire on strikes on energy infrastructure, as well as a longer-term peace deal.

The halt on infrastructure attacks was loosely agreed in talks between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump last week, with a 30-day timeline.

But that narrowly defined ceasefire was quickly cast into doubt, with Moscow saying Ukraine hit an oil depot in southern Russia while Kyiv said Russia had struck hospitals and homes, and knocked out power to some railways.

Last week Mr Zelensky said Kyiv would draw up a list of facilities that could be subject to the partial ceasefire. That list could include not only energy, but also rail and port infrastructure, he said.

A moratorium on energy infrastructure strikes could favour Moscow more than Kyiv, given it would prevent Ukraine from conducting long-range strikes on Russian oil facilities, a key way that it has inflicted pain on its enemy.

The electronic hum in the sky above told him that the Russians were on a hunting safari and that he was the prey. Leaping from his bicycle, Oleksandr left its wheels spinning as he bolted through a hole in a fence hoping to find cover.

Horrified to discover he was still in the open air, he threw himself against the fence, hoping to blend in, to somehow hide. The drone tracked sideways, hung above him, and dropped its bomb.

The explosion tore a chunk of his leg away.

Ukrainians living in bombed-out Kherson tell world affairs editor Sam Kiley how Russian drones target them as they go about their daily lives – and how their brutal injuries are cared for in a hospital forced underground:

Russia's air defence units intercepted and destroyed 28 Ukrainian drones overnight, the Russian defence ministry said this morning.

Of these, 12 drones were downed each over the border Kursk region and the southern Russia Rostov region, the ministry said on its Telegram channel.

The remaining four were destroyed over Crimea, the Krasnodar region and the waters of the Sea of Azov, the ministry added.

A US delegation is set to hold another round of ceasefire talks today in Saudi Arabia, as officials from the Trump administration meet separately with both Ukrainian and Russian representatives in their bid to end the war in Ukraine.

"I think that you're going to see in Saudi Arabia on Monday some real progress, particularly as it affects a Black Sea ceasefire on ships between both countries. And from that, you'll naturally gravitate into a full-on shooting ceasefire,” the US special envoy Steve Witkoff said.

White House national security adviser Mike Waltz said the United States was talking through a range of confidence-building measures aimed at ending the war, including on the future of Ukrainian children taken into Russia.

Asked about the goals for the broader negotiations, Mr Waltz said that after a Black Sea ceasefire was agreed "we'll talk the line of control, which is the actual front lines".

"And that gets into the details of verification mechanisms, peacekeeping, freezing the lines where they are," he said. "And then of course, the broader and permanent peace."

Donald Trump has floated the idea of taking control of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, in a phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

The conversation on Wednesday was described as positive by both sides and was mainly aimed at securing a truce between Ukraine and Russia on aerial attacks against one another’s energy infrastructure.

Mr Zelensky suggested the call had focused on the US takeover of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which is under Russian control.

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Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin have both insisted that Ukraine’s forces in Kursk are surrounded by Russian troops and are in imminent danger, but U.S. intelligence reports have contradicted those claims.

A trio of U.S. and European officials familiar with intelligence details of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine told Reuters that the situation on the ground does not reflect the comments made by Trump and Putin.

One of the U.S. officials also said that the White House was briefed on the actual situation in Ukraine, so it’a unclear why Trump has and continues to claim that Ukrainian troops in Russia's Kursk region are surrounded.

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For Donald Trump, talks with the Kremlin are a path to ending the Ukraine conflict as fast as possible. And if there’s a Nobel Peace Prize in it for him, all well and good. Securing some great deals for US business would be even better. For Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, talks are a path to victory and to the victor, the spoils. To get there, the KGB veteran has read Trump like a book.

Putin has correctly calculated the precise way to bamboozle Trump into agreeing to his maximalist demands is to sweeten any eventual deal with some attractive business propositions for the Americans.

“The two leaders agreed that a future with an improved bilateral relationship between the United States and Russia has huge upside,” read the official White House readout of the two-hour Trump-Putin conversation earlier this week, jarringly mixing the lexicon of international diplomacy with that of real estate. “This includes enormous economic deals and geopolitical stability when peace has been achieved.”

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Russia launched its third consecutive overnight air attack on Kyiv, wounding one person and damaging several houses in the region surrounding the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv's regional governor said this morning.

A 37-year-old man has been hospitalised after he received shrapnel wounds in his upper body and head, governor Mykola Kalashnyk said on his Telegram channel.

This comes just hours after Russia's attack injured a 54-year-old woman and damaged windows of multi-story and residential buildings in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia region.

Firefighters continued for the fifth day to fight a fire at an oil depot in Russia's Krasnodar region, sparked last week by a drone attack that authorities blamed on Ukraine, the regional administration said.

"One of the tanks and oil products inside the facility are burning," the administration said in a post on the Telegram yesterday.

“As of 1700 GMT on Sunday, the area of the fire at the depot near the village of Kavkazskaya was around 2,000sqm (21,500sqft)”, the administration said on Telegram.

The fire area nearly doubled the night before following an oil products spill.

The Russian foreign ministry said the incident amounted to a violation of an agreement to halt attacks on energy infrastructure under efforts to secure a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine.

Local authorities had brought in firefighting trains loaded with water to help to battle the blaze till yesterday.

The depot is a rail terminal for Russian oil supplies for a pipeline to Kazakhstan.