Ukraine-Russia war live: Trump explains why he is cancelling ‘wasted’ Putin meeting – UK Times

Ukraine has carried out an attack on a Russian chemical plant using British provided Storm Shadow missiles, the Ukrainian military said.

Ukraine’s general staff of the armed forces said the strike was a “successful hit” penetrating through the Russian air defence system.

“The Bryansk Chemical Plant is a key facility of the aggressor state’s military-industrial complex”, the Ukrainian military said in a post on X yesterday.

Ukrainian officials said the plant “produces gunpowder, explosives and rocket fuel components used in ammunition and missiles employed by the enemy to shell the territory of Ukraine”.

They are still assessing the outcome of the “massive combined missile and air strike”.

President Donald Trump said his plan for a snap summit with Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Hungary has been put on hold because it would have been a “waste of time”.

The rapid U-turn on the leaders’ meeting is the latest twist in Trump’s stop-and-go effort to resolve the war in Ukraine.

The decision to hold off on the meeting in Budapest, Hungary, which Trump had announced last week, was made following a call on Monday between secretary of state Marco Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov.

“I don’t want to have a wasted meeting,” Trump said. “I don’t want to have a waste of time — so we’ll see what happens.”

Lavrov made clear in public comments yesterday that Russia is opposed to an immediate ceasefire.

Trump, meanwhile, has been shifting his stance all year on key issues in the war, including whether a ceasefire should come before longer-term peace talks, and whether Ukraine could win back land seized by Russia during almost four years of fighting.

Russian night-time missile strikes sparked fires and hurled debris across several districts in Ukraine’s capital, igniting cars and shattering windows, Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said.

Emergency services were dispatched to several sites where the debris from the destroyed air weapons fell, but no casualties have been reported, Klitschko said.

The size of the attack, which Klitschko said was carried out with ballistic missiles, and the primary target were not immediately clear. There was no immediate comment from Russia.

In the region surrounding Kyiv, a private residential house caught fire as a result of the Russian attack, injuring an elderly woman, the region’s governor, Mykola Kalashnyk, said on Telegram.

gather next to destroyed shops following what local authorities called a Ukrainian overnight drone attack in the course of Russia-Ukraine conflict, in Bataysk in the Rostov region, Russia on 21 October 2025.

Russia’s military has said it is paying close attention as Nato’s ongoing nuclear deterrence exercise gets underway, the Kremlin said on Tuesday.

It said it will carefully analyse its progress and intent, as it takes place in the Netherlands.

The Steadfast Noon exercise began last week and involved 71 aircrafts from 41 nations.

Ukraine’s allies are concerned over the war-hit nation’s position on the battlefield and diplomatically, amid fears that Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin could sign a bad ceasefire deal, weakening all of Europe.

The outcome of their meeting could be a disaster not just for Ukraine but also for Europe, European officials have said.

“We see president Trump’s efforts to bring peace to Ukraine. Of course all these efforts are welcome, but we don’t see Russia really wanting peace,” top EU diplomat Kaja Kallas told reporters in Luxembourg yesterday.

“Russia only understands strength.”

Ukraine and its allies have long called for an immediate ceasefire with troops in place, while Moscow has demanded Ukraine cede further territory before it would halt fighting.

A critical region of Ukraine became the centre of a heated debate between Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump during a White House meeting, according to reports.

Vladimir Putin has long demanded that Ukraine cede the Donbas to Moscow, a chunk of eastern Ukraine the majority of which has been occupied by Russian forces since its February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

At an explosive meeting in Washington, DC on Friday, the US president is said to have told Zelensky to accept Russia’s terms or risk facing destruction.

President Zelensky’s visit to the Oval Office allegedly turned into a “shouting match”, with Trump resorting to profanity, sources told the Financial Times.

Trump reportedly aside maps of the Ukrainian frontline, urging Zelensky to surrender the Donbas region to Russia, seemingly adopting points Vladimir Putin made to Trump in their call the day before.

But it was reported that Zelensky succeeded in bringing Trump back to endorsing a freeze of the current front lines.

Click here to see the map of the Donbas region, and where the frontline cuts through it.

US president Donald Trump said on Tuesday, when asked why his planned summit in Hungary with Russian president Vladimir Putin was put on hold, said he did not want to have a wasted meeting.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump said he had not made a determination about the meeting, which the president had wanted to hold soon in Budapest.

Russia launched an overnight air attack on Kyiv, with Ukraine’s air defence units trying to repel it, Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of the Ukrainian capital, said on Wednesday.

“Stay in shelters!” Klitschko said in a post on the Telegram messaging app.

Reuters’ witnesses heard explosions in what sounded like air defence units in operation.

Ukraine’s military said late on Tuesday that it struck a chemical plant in southern Russia’s Bryansk region that it described as vital to Moscow’s war effort, in an attack that included Franco-British Storm Shadow air-launched missiles.

“A massive combined missile-and-air strike was carried out, including with air-launched Storm Shadow missiles that penetrated Russia’s air defence system,” the General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app.

“The results of the strike are being assessed,” it said.

It described the plant as a “key facility” producing gunpowder, explosives and rocket fuel.

The Independent could not independently verify the report.

The Russian Defence Ministry said in a Telegram post on Tuesday evening that within four hours in the afternoon its air defence units destroyed 57 Ukrainian drones over the Bryansk region.

The ministry rarely reports any damages inflicted by Ukraine in the war that Russia started with its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Alexander Bogomaz, the governor of Bryansk region, said in a Telegram post that Ukraine was attacking the region with drones and missiles on Tuesday afternoon. He added that no one was injured in the attack and no damage was reported.