A Russian UN envoy on Wednesday gave a guarded response to Donald Trump’s demand for Vladimir Putin to make a deal and end the war in Ukraine. “It’s not merely the question of ending the war. It’s first and foremost the question of addressing the root causes of the Ukrainian crisis,” said Dmitry Polyanskiy, Russia’s deputy ambassador at the United Nations. “So we have to see what does the ‘deal’ mean in President Trump’s understanding.” As Pjotr Sauer reports, Trump has threatened Russia with taxes, tariffs and sanctions if a deal to end the war in Ukraine is not struck soon. Trump said Russia’s economy was failing and his Russian counterpart must “settle now and stop this ridiculous war”.
Tatiana Stanovaya, the founder of the political analysis firm R.Politik, said that despite Trump’s efforts to force Putin to negotiate, the Russian leader appeared convinced that he had the resources to outlast Ukraine. “A peace deal on Russian terms would save significant resources, but absent such an agreement, Putin is prepared to fight for as long as it takes.” Russia’s current economic situation was unlikely to compel Putin to negotiate with Ukraine. “If the Kremlin concludes that no favourable deal with Trump is forthcoming, they will likely focus on prolonging the conflict.”
Russia claimed on Wednesday it had taken control of the village of Zapadne in Ukraine’s north-eastern Kharkiv region. Russia has managed to establish a bridgehead on the western bank this year and Zapadne is located about 4km (2.5 miles) west of the Oskil River, marking a significant gain. The Kharkiv region is under constant shelling and two men were killed one day earlier in the village of Goptivka, according to the Ukrainian governor, Oleg Synegubov. The Ukrainian air force said on Wednesday that air defences had shot down 65 Russian drones in 10 regions, including Kharkiv.
The claimed Russian advance came as its troops close in on Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, acknowledged on Tuesday that “in the east, we have a difficult situation”. The general staff of the Ukrainian armed forces said the Russians continued to concentrate their main efforts on Pokrovsk.
The financier-turned-activist Bill Browder is making a push for all $300bn (£243bn) of frozen Russian assets to be spent on funding Kyiv’s military. Graeme Wearden and John Collingridge write that Browder, speaking on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, warned that if US military support for Ukraine dried up and alternative funding was not found, Russian territorial gains would force millions of Ukrainians to flee, creating “a refugee problem like we’ve never seen before”. Browder has been a leading campaigner against Vladimir Putin’s regime since his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was arrested and died in custody 15 years ago.
The Yantar, a Russian “spy ship”, was tracked closely by the Royal Navy this week after it entered UK waters on Monday and passed through the Channel at a time of heightened concern about the safety of undersea cables, Dan Sabbagh writes. The defence secretary, John Healey, said: “We see you. We know what you’re doing,” as he accused the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, of trying to threaten European security by targeting undersea infrastructure. The Yantar had been “mapping the UK’s critical underwater infrastructure” as it passed through British waters for the second time in less than three months, Healey said in front of MPs.
Residents of Russia’s Kursk region have made co-ordinated social media posts appealing for help to find relatives after the Ukrainian border offensive launched last August, Russian media reported on Wednesday. People in the Russian region have for months accused authorities of not doing enough to secure their loved ones, and of keeping them in the dark about the scale of fighting. Ukraine says thousands of its own civilians are being held in areas seized and occupied by Moscow since its assault began in February 2022, and that it is providing safe passage to Russians in the Kursk region. A French official told Agence France-Presse that French military resources had also been mobilised to monitor Yantar but the ship “had no proven hostile intent”.
A Russian military court on Wednesday upheld a life sentence for Alexander Permyakov, convicted of seriously injuring the pro-Kremlin writer Zakhar Prilepin by blowing up his car in 2023. Permyakov, who has both Russian and Ukrainian citizenship, told the court that Ukraine’s SBU security service had promised him $20,000 for killing Prilepin. Permyakov’s defence team at the appeal hearing said he had given investigators information on hidden weapons and told them the location of an unexploded device. Ukraine has not formally claimed the attack on Prilepin but the head of the Ukrainian SBU, Vasyl Maliuk, called the Russian writer a “real war criminal” and said that in the attack, the victim’s “pelvis and legs were badly injured and sorry, he was left without genitals”. Prilepin denied the latter claim.
