Ukraine-Russia war live: Zelensky blocks drone sales as he waits for Trump to resume peace talks with Putin – UK Times

A Swedish court on Sunday ordered the detention of the Russian captain of a ship that was suspected to be sailing under a false flag in the Baltic Sea and was boarded by authorities last week.

The commander of the Sea Owl 1, whose name hasn’t been released, was arrested on Friday — the day after the Swedish coast guard boarded the vessel off Trelleborg, on Sweden’s southern coast.

Prosecutors suspect him of using a false document. They said Sunday that the district court in Ystad ordered him held in custody in line with their request, Swedish news agency TT reported.

The tanker was sailing under the flag of the Comoros, an island nation off East Africa. But the coast guard has said that it suspects it isn’t in the shipping registry there and therefore there is no flag state to vouch for safety on board.

Volodymyr Zelensky has said the treatment from Ukraine’s European allies over the Druzbha oil pipeline is a “blackmail”.

The Ukrainian branch of the Druzhba oil pipeline, which supplies Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia, was severely ⁠damaged by fire after a Russian attack, Ukraine’s energy minister Denys Shmyhal told Interfax Ukraine on Tuesday.

Zelensky said Ukraine is now facing European pressure to allow oil to flow from the pipeline which has been disconnected since an attack in January.

“If we have decided to restore Russian oil supplies, then I want them to know that I am against it. … But if I am given conditions that Ukraine will not receive weapons, then, excuse me, I am powerless on this issue; I told our friends in Europe that this is called blackmail,” Zelensky said in reported remarks.

The European Commission has proposed sending a fact-finding mission to inspect the damage to the Druzhba pipeline in an attempt to resolve the dispute.

Ukraine is waiting for the US and Russian officials to continue the next round of trilateral peace talks, Volodymy Zelensky said.

Zelensky said the US had proposed hosting a meeting but Russia has refused to send a delegation to take the talks forward.

“We are waiting for a response from the Americans,” he said.

This comes at a time the US is reportedly losing interest in brokering an end to the war in Ukraine.

“A pause has indeed appeared in the talks. The Americans have other priorities, and that’s understandable,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told the Financial Times.

Volodymyr Zelensky has said foreign countries and firms willing to buy Ukrainian drones should not be able to bypass the Ukrainian government by talking directly to manufacturers.

The Ukrainian war-time president said a new system was needed to prevent this from happening and that his administration has already reprimanded one manufacturer for selling interceptors without considering the implications for Ukraine’s defences.

His remarks come at a time the war in the Middle East has put a spotlight on Ukraine’s defence capabilities, honed in the continuing war against Russia, especially against the Iranian Shahed drones.

Zelensky has warned private drone makers in Ukraine should not pursue direct export deals outside of government oversight.

“I have never heard that the United States isn’t interested. I have heard the opposite – that the United States is very interested,” Zelensky said, speaking to reporters in Kyiv over the weekend.

Volodymyr Zelensky has said Ukraine wants money and technology in return for helping Middle Eastern nations that have sought its expertise as they defend against Iranian kamikaze drones.

The Zelensky administration has already sent its specialists to the war-hit region as several of the US and Israel’s allies fight off incoming Iranian Shahed drones, which Ukraine has gained superiority over in the more than four-year-old war against Russia.

Zelensky told reporters that three teams were sent to the Middle East to conduct expert assessments and demonstrate how drone defences should operate. Earlier this week he said teams were sent to Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, as well as a US military base in Jordan.

Kenya’s foreign minister is visiting Russia this week under pressure back home to convince Moscow to stop recruiting Kenyans into its military, but Nairobi “ like other governments in Africa“ is unlikely to take too confrontational an approach.

Reports in recent weeks revealed the scope and scale of the recruitment of Africans into Russia’s depleted forces, often via third parties offering lucrative civilian jobs, triggering anger in countries like Kenya, Ghana and South Africa.

Families want more action to bring the recruits home but African governments, wary about overtly taking sides during Russia’s war in Ukraine, have avoided angering Moscow, mindful that the recruitment scandal has not yet triggered widespread public outcry or political heat.

“We want Kenyans stopped – they should not be enlisted at all,” Musalia Mudavadi, Kenya’s minister for foreign affairs, told Reuters ahead of his trip. “We are getting a lot of pressure from some of the affected families who are now gathering more courage to come forward and speak to the issue,” he said.

However, Mudavadi said he was pragmatic and realistic over the issue, describing Russia as a superpower with which Nairobi has had a long relationship.

“It’s not a confrontation,” he said. “This is about speaking to issues as they are and the distress that they’re causing to the Kenyan people, and we need a joint effort to be able to resolve it,” he said.

“Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” which takes on the Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s propaganda and patriotism program for the nation’s youth after its invasion of Ukraine, has won the Oscar for best documentary feature.

“In the name of our future, in the name of all of our children, stop all of these wars now,” the film’s protagonist and co-director Pavel Talankin said in Russian from the stage through a translator.

Talankin was a teacher and activities director in a small-town school in Russia who captured his students’ lessons, chants and songs promoting the war in Ukraine on video. He smuggled his hard drives out of the country to collaborate with American director David Borenstein, who lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The two men gave the night some of its most overtly political moments during their speeches. Borenstein spoke broadly about nations tipping into totalitarianism, while clearly emphasizing similarities between his country and Talankin’s.

“‘Mr. Nobody Against Putin’ is about how you lose your country,” Borenstein said. “You lose it through countless small little acts of complicity,” he said.

Cheers in the auditorium grew as Borenstein said you lose a country when “we don’t say anything” when governments kill people in the streets and oligarchs seek to consolidate control over media outlets.

“We all face a moral choice, but luckily even a nobody is more powerful than you think,” Borenstein said.

The war in Ukraine has loomed large in Oscar documentary categories since it began. The Associated Press’ documentary “20 Days in Mariupol” won best documentary feature in 2024.

This year’s documentary short nominees included “Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud,” about an American journalist killed in the war.

A Russian attack on a hydropower plant has spilled into the Nistru River, threatening Moldova’s water supply and prompting an environmental alert.

In a post on X, Moldovan president Maia Sandu wrote: “Russia’s attack on Ukraine’s Novodnistrovsk hydropower plant has spilled oil into the Nistru River, threatening Moldova’s water supply.

“We declared environmental alert and are acting to protect our people. Russia bears full responsibility.”

The US and South Korean militaries are discussing moving some of the American Patriot missile defence systems based in South Korea to be used in the war against Iran.

South Korean foreign minister Cho Hyun on Friday was responding to a question at a parliamentary hearing and said the two nations were working closely together. The decision on the deployment of weapons and military personnel would be made on a case-by-case basis, he said.

But what are Patriot systems, and why are they so important?

No 10 has instead urged its international allies to maintain pressure on Moscow, and to avoid inadvertently funding Putin’s war in Ukraine by purchasing Russian oil.