Ukraine-Russia war latest: US to restart military dialogue with Moscow after almost five-year suspension – UK Times

The most divisive issues are Moscow’s demands that Kyiv give up land it still controls and the fate of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, which sits in a Russian-occupied area.

Russia wants Ukraine to pull its troops out of all the Donetsk region, including heavily fortified cities regarded as one of Ukraine’s strongest defences, as a precondition for any deal.

Ukraine says the conflict should be frozen along current front lines and rejects any unilateral pullback of its forces.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Russian troops would keep fighting until Kyiv made “decisions” that could bring the war to an end.

Russia occupies about 20 per cent of Ukraine’s national territory, including Crimea and parts of the eastern Donbas region seized before the 2022 invasion.

Analysts say Russia has gained about 1.5 per cent of Ukrainian territory since early 2024.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said further US sanctions against Russia depend on peace talks aimed at ending the nearly four-year-old Ukraine war.

Bessent, who participated in talks with Russian officials and president Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner in Miami on Saturday, said he would consider new sanctions against Russia’s shadow fleet – a step Trump has not taken since returning to office in January 2025.

“I will take it under consideration. We will see where the peace talks go,” Bessent said at a Senate Banking Committee hearing.

He said the Trump administration’s US sanctions against Russian oil majors Rosneft and Lukoil had helped bring Russia to the negotiating table in the peace talks.

Nato defence ministers will likely discuss measures to bolster the security of Greenland in a meeting next week, defence secretary John Healey said, after US president Donald Trump nearly upended the alliance over his desire to acquire it.

Trump has repeatedly asserted that he wants Greenland, saying European allies have failed to properly secure it. His comments sparked a dispute with Nato member Denmark over its overseas territory and strained the defence alliance.

Those tensions eased after Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte said he had discussed how Nato allies could work collectively to ensure Arctic security with Trump, but details of those plans remain scarce.

Nighttime shelling by Ukraine inflicted “serious damage” in the Russian city of Belgorod, near the border, the region’s governor said in the early hours today.

Vyacheslav Gladkov, in a solemn video posted on Telegram after midnight, said city officials were holding an emergency meeting to devise a plan of action.

“I cannot say good evening, unfortunately, my dear friends,” Gladkov said in the video, recorded in near-darkness.

“The enemy has shelled the civilian city of Belgorod. Everyone knows we have no military targets. There has been serious damage. I have been out to look around,” he said.

A post on the unofficial Russian Telegram channel Mash, which has sources in the security services, said missiles had hit the city that lies about 40km (25 miles) from the Ukrainian border and power had been cut in some districts.

Ukrainian forces have regularly attacked Belgorod and nearby parts of the region since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of its smaller neighbour.

A new wargame simulating a Russian incursion into Lithuania, carried out by ex-Nato and German officials, concluded that Moscow would “achieve most of its goals” within days.

The exercise envisaged a scenario where the Kremlin used bogus claims of a “humanitarian crisis” in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad to seize the Lithuanian city of Marijampole to its east, a key conurbation through which the road linking Russia and Belarus runs.

The scenario, which plays out in October 2026, suggests that an absence of US leadership and hesitancy from Nato countries could allow Moscow to gain total control over the Baltic within days, using an initial force of only 15,000 troops.

“The Russians achieved most of their goals without moving many of their own units,” Bartłomiej Kot, a Polish security analyst who acted as the Polish prime minister, told The Wall Street Journal. “What this showed to me is that once we are confronted by the escalatory narrative from the Russian side, we have it embedded in our thinking that we are the ones who should be de-escalating.”

Poland is preparing a new 200m zloty ($55.91m, £41.18m) aid package for Ukraine mainly made up of armoured equipment, prime minister Donald Tusk announced on his visit to Kyiv yesterday.

He said that Poland could give Ukraine MiG-29 fighter jets at any time, but that Volodymyr Zelensky had told him Kyiv may need other air-defence equipment as a higher priority, and that he would discuss this with Polish officials and get back to the Ukrainian president about it on Monday.

The Kremlin said it regretted the expiration of the last remaining nuclear arms pact between Russia and the United States, while US president Donald Trump declared he was against keeping its limits and wants a better deal.

The pact’s termination left no caps on the two largest atomic arsenals for the first time in more than a half-century, fueling fears of an unconstrained nuclear arms race.

Russian president Vladimir Putin last year declared his readiness to stick to the treaty’s limits for another year if Washington followed suit, but Trump has ignored the offer and argued that he wants China to be a part of a new pact — something Beijing has rebuffed.

“Rather than extend ‘NEW START’ (A badly negotiated deal by the United States that, aside from everything else, is being grossly violated), we should have our Nuclear Experts work on a new, improved, and modernized Treaty that can last long into the future,” Trump posted on his Truth Social network.

Putin discussed the pact’s expiration with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Wednesday, noting the US failure to respond to his proposal to extend its limits and saying that Russia “will act in a balanced and responsible manner based on thorough analysis of the security situation,” Kremlin adviser Yuri Ushakov said.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Moscow views the treaty’s expiration Thursday “negatively” and regrets it. He said Russia will maintain its “responsible, thorough approach to stability when it comes to nuclear weapons,” adding that “of course, it will be guided primarily by its national interests.”

The US and Russia have agreed to reestablish high level dialogue between their militaries, the US European Command said in a statement published yesterday.

“Following the productive and constructive progress towards President (Donald) Trump’s goal of peace in Ukraine made by Jared Kushner and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff over the past week, the US and Russian Federation agreed today in Abu Dhabi to reestablish high level military-to-military dialogue,” the statement said.

“This channel of communication was suspended in the fall of 2021, just prior to the onset of the conflict,” the United States European Command said in a statement, referring to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.