The aerial bomb is a winged but engineless weapon that drops from an aircraft at altitude, gliding to its target on the speed and altitude of release, steered by satellite guidance. It costs much less than cruise missiles per shot, carries much larger warheads than most drones and lets aircraft stay outside the densest air defenses.

“The first Ukrainian guided aerial bomb is ready for combat use,” Minister of Defense Mykhailo Fedorov wrote in a Telegram post announcing the milestone, noting the Ministry has already purchased an experimental batch and is gearing up to deploy the bombs on the front.

“Ukraine is moving from importing individual solutions to creating its own high-tech weapons, which systematically strengthen the Defense Forces and provide a technological advantage on the battlefield,” Fedorov said.

Until now, Ukraine had no domestic precision glide bomb. The country has relied on scarce Western donations for strikes beyond the reach of conventional artillery, like American-made JDAM-ERs and ATACMS missiles, British Storm Shadows and French SCALP-EG cruise missiles.

Cheap to produce and free of donor restrictions, the new bombs let Kyiv press the fight at mid-range and conserve scarce longer-range Western missiles for deeper targets — part of a broader Ukrainian push to use tech to change the mathematics of war in its favor after over four years of defending itself against a much larger and richer enemy.

“We are scaling up solutions that increase the range and accuracy of strikes and change the rules of modern warfare,” Fedorov said.

DG Industry, a little-known Ukrainian firm sponsored by the state-backed defense innovation cluster Brave1, started work on the munition 17 months ago, MoD said.

Ukraine had no guided aerial bomb. Now it does.

DG Industry, a Brave1 participant, has completed all required trials and declared the weapon ready for combat after 17 month of development. The bomb carries a 250 kg warhead, hits targets dozens of kilometers behind enemy lines,… pic.twitter.com/EXP0PiLOHl

— BRAVE1 (@BRAVE1ua) May 18, 2026

The team faced a challenging environment, requiring guidance that could survive Russia’s electronic jamming, an airframe that stays stable across release speeds and altitudes and an interface that integrates with whichever aircraft will carry it, according to Brave1.

The result is a system officials say is different from others in its class.

Russia’s UMPK-equipped FAB bombs, for example, are glide kits bolted onto Soviet-era bomb bodies that were never meant to glide. The Ukrainian weapon is purpose-built from the airframe up, not a glide kit.

“This is not a copy of Western or Soviet solutions, but a development of Ukrainian engineers for effective destruction of fortifications, command posts, and other enemy targets tens of kilometers deep after launch,” Fedorov said.

Glide bombs also offer another edge.

Released from standoff distance, they appear over the target only in the last seconds of flight, leaving traditional air defenses little time to react.

They can be harder to detect, too, flying at different speeds, arcs and altitudes than the threats most air defense systems are optimized to track, according to NATO’s Joint Air Power Competence Centre.

Russian Su-34s release the bombs from well beyond Ukrainian air-defense coverage, and once airborne, the bombs themselves are small, unpowered and hard to track.

Ukraine knows from experience how hard they are to stop.

Russia now drops an average of more than 250 guided aerial bombs on Ukrainian positions and cities each day, according to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Earlier this month, three FAB-250 strikes on Kramatorsk killed five civilians and injured 12 more, according to regional military officials.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has named glide bombs among Russia’s most dangerous weapons since Moscow began deploying them regularly in 2023.

And they cost far more to shoot down than to produce and deploy.

A UMPK-equipped FAB costs tens of thousands of dollars to manufacture, while a single Patriot interceptor capable of stopping one runs in the millions.

The new Ukrainian glide bomb is built to make that asymmetric cost ratio Russia’s problem, too.

“Soon, Ukrainian guided aerial bombs will be used against enemy targets,” the Ministry of Defense said.

Ukraine and Russia agreed on Friday to a ceasefire from May 9 to May 11 as part of a U.S.-led push for peace under President Donald Trump after more than four years of war following Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

Trump said on Friday he hoped the ceasefire would be extended, but it was already showing signs of strain on Sunday, when each side accused the other of violating it.

Russia, Ukraine to enter temporary ceasefire with prisoner exchange, Trump says

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday Moscow had refrained from large-scale aerial and missile attacks but had continued assaults along parts of the 745-mile front line where Russian forces are advancing.

He said Ukrainian troops were responding and defending their positions.

Russian state news agencies reported on Monday that Russia’s Defence Ministry had said it had recorded 23,802 ceasefire violations by Ukraine since the start of the ceasefire.

Russian troops had responded in kind to Ukrainian attacks on rocket launchers, artillery and drone launch sites, the ministry was quoted as saying.

One person was killed and three wounded in a Ukrainian attack on Russia’s southern Belgorod region, Russian state news agency TASS cited the regional governor as saying on Monday.

Frontline clashes

The General Staff of Ukraine’s military said 180 battlefield clashes had been recorded along the front line over the previous 24 hours. Russian forces had on Sunday deployed “kamikaze” drones and artillery in attacks on settlements and military positions, it said in a Monday morning update.

In its Monday afternoon report, the General Staff said Russian troops had carried out 38 new assaults on Ukrainian positions, adding: “Artillery shelling of border areas continues.”

Regional governors in Ukraine reported early on Monday that at least three people had been killed in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia and southern Kherson regions over the past 24 hours.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Saturday he thought the war was coming to an end and that he would be willing to negotiate new security arrangements for Europe, with Germany’s former chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, as his preferred partner.

But European Union foreign ministers, arriving for a meeting in Brussels on Monday, rejected Putin’s suggestion, voicing skepticism that Russia was ready to end the war and negotiate sincerely on peace and security for Europe.

In separate statements, Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the proposal would include a ceasefire running through May 11 and the exchange of 1,000 prisoners from each country.

Trump described the ceasefire as the result of U.S. diplomacy, writing in a Truth Social post that the request “was made directly by me.” He then thanked both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Zelenskyy for agreeing to the pause in fighting.

Zelenskyy, however, framed the agreement around the return of Ukrainian prisoners of war, and he seemed guarded about Russia’s willingness to uphold the ceasefire.

“We expect the United States to ensure that the Russian side fulfills these agreements,” he said in a social media post after thanking Trump for his involvement.

Ukraine’s skepticism toward the Russian commitment comes amid concerns about Moscow’s alignment with Iran.

Last month, a Ukrainian intelligence assessment alleged Russia had shared satellite imagery and cyber support with Tehran to support attacks against the U.S. and other countries.

Trump in late April publicly raised the idea of a temporary ceasefire for marking the anniversary of the end of World War II after a phone call with Putin. At the Time, Trump told reporters that he had suggested “a little bit of a ceasefire,” saying that Putin “might do that.”

The proposed ceasefire coincides with Russia’s Victory Day, which commemorates the Soviet Union’s role in defeating Nazi Germany during World War II.

He spoke after the Kremlin reported the two leaders discussed a temporary Ukraine ceasefire to mark the anniversary of the end of World War II next month.

“We had a good talk, I’ve known him a long time,” said Trump. The two leaders had their last publicly reported phone call on March 9, although Trump has indicated they speak regularly.

Trump, speaking to reporters as he met with astronauts from the Artemis II mission in the Oval Office, said he suggested “a little bit of a ceasefire” in the war in Ukraine in his phone call with the Russian leader.

“And I think he might do that,” Trump said, then asked reporters whether Putin had already announced a ceasefire.

Putin announced a similar truce last year that lasted three days but was not agreed with Kyiv.

Trump has a history of making positive comments about Putin and sharply criticizing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for not agreeing to make a deal with Russia to end the war.

Help with Iran’s uranium

Trump said Putin offered to help on the issue of Iran’s enriched uranium, a key obstacle to a deal to end the Iran war, but “I said I’d much rather have you be involved with ending the war with Ukraine.”

“I said, before you help me, I want to end your war,” said Trump.

Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov did not say what proposals Putin had made on Iran. Moscow has previously offered to take enriched uranium out of the country.

Ushakov told reporters Putin had proposed the temporary ceasefire in Ukraine for celebrations on May 9 to mark the Soviet Union’s part in the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War Two. He said Trump reacted positively.

Ushakov added that Trump, in a friendly and businesslike conversation lasting over 1-1/2 hours, had said he believed a deal to end the Ukraine war was close.

He promised to bomb every bridge and power plant in the country. Not as a warning. As an ultimatum, with a countdown, posted for the world to read along with the 93 million people he profanely threatened to annihilate.

The next day, civilians in Tehran were standing on the infrastructure he had threatened to destroy. Mothers, students, old men — they linked arms across overpasses, formed human chains around bridges and power plants, shielding them with their bodies, an NBC News video showed.

Asked whether he was concerned about war crimes, Trump told reporters he was “not at all.”

Retired American military officers said the threats themselves were likely war crimes — and that Trump had handed prosecutors a ready-made record. “He’s essentially self-incriminating,” one retired senior officer told reporters, per The Guardian.

Legal experts noted that threatening to systematically destroy civilian power plants and bridges, regardless of whether the strikes occur, can itself constitute evidence of criminal intent under the laws of armed conflict, according to The New York Times.

At the same time, White House envoys, billionaire Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, were supposed to fly to Ukraine after Orthodox Easter this weekend carrying new security guarantees but were rerouted to Pakistan instead, for talks in Islamabad the same weekend the Kyiv visit was planned.

The administration was starting a war with one hand and promising to end one with the other. The same president who threatened to destroy civilian infrastructure in Iran on Tuesday is supposed to guarantee that no one destroys Ukrainian civilian infrastructure ever again.

“Is the U.S. going to provide Ukraine something like mutual security assistance? I don’t think so,” Ed Arnold, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and a former British military officer, told Military Times.

“And even if they did, do the Ukrainians believe in it? And pretty critically — does Putin believe in it?”

Moscow already had an answer.

“The Americans have a lot of other things to deal with, if you know what I mean,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, according to the Kyiv Independent.

“The primary movers in these so-called peace talks — the Americans — are now busy with other things,” a senior European diplomat told Military Times, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security assessments.

And they took the interceptors with them. The U.S. military burned through more than 800 Patriot missiles in the Middle East in three days — more than Ukraine has received in the entire war — while the production line makes roughly 600 a year.

The White House has since suspended Patriot export sales globally because of supply constraints, according to The Atlantic.

Meanwhile, the administration rolled back Russian oil sanctions — the same restrictions that had been slowly strangling Moscow’s ability to finance the war — just as the Iran conflict sent crude past $100 a barrel, opening a window for Russia to sell at wartime prices with no cap and no consequences.

“Just this easing by America could provide Russia with around $10 billion for the war,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said alongside French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris. “This certainly does not help peace,” according to Al Jazeera.

The sanctions rollback did not just weaken Ukraine’s position at the table — it actively financed the war Ukraine was supposed to be negotiating its way out of.

“This is throwing a massive lifeline to Putin,” the senior diplomat said.

Kyiv has fought harder anyway.

Its forces have recaptured more than 480 square kilometers in the southeast since January, pushing the ballistic missile interception rate toward 95%, and sent long-range strikes deeper inside Russia than at any point in the war — and for every short- to medium-range missile Russia fired in, Ukraine was sending more out.

Its forces achieved a drone advantage over Russia in what the Institute for the Study of War called a possible first in combat history, striking oil ports from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

But the Iran war has made those capabilities impossible to ignore. As Tehran launched waves of drones and missiles across the Middle East, nations scrambling to respond found themselves watching Ukrainian-developed systems do what their own could not — handing Zelenskyy leverage overnight that years of diplomacy never had.

Ukraine’s long-range drones have knocked out an estimated 40% of Russia’s oil export capacity, around 2 million barrels per day offline, in one of the most severe oil supply disruptions in the modern history of Russia, according to Reuters.

Washington did not celebrate any of it. The administration told Kyiv to stop striking, and the same week, Vice President JD Vance flew to Budapest to campaign for Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán — Putin’s closest partner in the EU — while accusing European allies of election interference.

Zelenskyy confirmed that allies had sent Ukraine “signals” about scaling back strikes on Russia’s oil sector, per Reuters. The State Department formally warned Kyiv’s ambassador to quit the attacks.

“Having severed most support to Ukraine, undermined the trust of its allies and made clear that it will avoid applying any serious pressure on Russia, Washington is rapidly bleeding leverage,” Arnold wrote in a recent RUSI analysis.

But the Iran war may have had the opposite effect on Ukraine’s standing, Arnold told Military Times. The country Washington is pressuring to stop fighting has just demonstrated that its technology works and America’s deterrence does not.

In the space of weeks, Washington has eased the sanctions squeezing Russia’s war budget, told Kyiv to stop the strikes crippling its oil exports and conditioned security guarantees on surrendering territory Ukrainian soldiers are still holding — a sequence that, to the allies watching it unfold, has looked less like negotiation than an attempt to dismantle Ukraine’s leverage piece by piece.

The war in Iran, the peace deal in Ukraine, stability in the Far East — all of it seems to run through one man in the White House, the senior diplomat said, who does not seem to worry about the long-term consequences of his global actions.

“You’ve pushed a domino in the dark,” he said.

“You have no idea which other dominos are lined up, who’s in the line of fall, what you’re going to face as a consequence — because you looked at this problem in complete isolation.”

“Expertise is not a drone, but a skill, a strategy, a system where a drone is one part of the defense,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Reuters on Monday.

Ukraine now produces roughly 1,000 interceptor drones a day through hundreds of vetted manufacturers, deliberately dispersed so that no single strike can cripple the supply chain, Zelenskyy reported last month. The country has the technical capacity to double that figure, he said, but lacks the budget to do so.

While Ukraine has built that infrastructure gradually over the last few years, most countries now trying to integrate interceptors into the air defense have not invested in building the necessary logistical framework needed to effectively build, arm or deploy the cheap flyers.

Some countries have already learned this lesson the hard way.

After some Ukrainian companies built interceptor drone factories abroad without state approval, multiple buyers complained because the drones were sold without the warheads or expertise needed to operate them properly, Zelenskyy said on Friday, per Ukrainska Pravda.

“They had also been sold a certain number of interceptors — again without explosives,” Zelenskyy said about a European country he visited recently. “And they asked me whether we could send more operators. I said no.”

The bottleneck isn’t the interceptor itself, but the logistics infrastructure to produce and sustain them at scale, officials said.

“It seems there is still a misconception,” Artem Moroz, head of investor relations at Brave1, wrote on LinkedIn last month.

Brave1, Ukraine’s defense-tech accelerator, has worked with more than 500 defense startups since 2023 and now serves as the primary gateway for foreign governments seeking access to Ukrainian drone technology and production partnerships.

“Many believe Ukraine could simply send a few hundred interceptor drones to the Middle East and stop the Shahed drones currently hitting critical infrastructure,” Moroz said. “Drone warfare is far more complex than that.

“Yes, hardware matters. And Ukraine knows how to build drones at scale. But the real advantage lies in the infrastructure behind them.”

Companies launch drone-production innovations

The gap between buying a drone and building the system to sustain it is the market several defense companies are now racing to fill.

A handful of defense companies from Helsinki to San Francisco are offering the production line, the detection system and the supply infrastructure compressed into a portable unit that can be shipped anywhere to produce up to dozens of drones a day.

Sensofusion, a Finnish defense company founded in 2016, sells a full-cycle drone production chain as one of the latest innovators in this arena.

The company’s $2.4 million (€2.1 million Euros) Tactical Drone Factory is a standard 20-foot shipping container equipped with industrial 3D printers, an electronics assembly station and enough spares to run around the clock with a crew of three, producing up to 50 interceptor drones a day, according to the company.

What sets the Finnish system apart from its competitors is that it’s not just a factory: It ships as a package with Sensofusion’s Airfence radio-frequency detection and tracking platform, designed to detect a hostile drone, cue an interceptor and guide it to the kill — a full sensor-to-effector chain in a box.

The company says each interceptor costs less than $580 (€500) and is built to chase targets at speeds up to 310 mph (500 km/h).

Although Sensofusion boasts some of the highest production numbers on the market, it’s not the first company to market the concept of a portable all-in-one drone production hub.

Firestorm Labs' xCell system, the most tested U.S. equivalent to Sensofusion, uses two containers and works at a significantly slower pace by producing roughly 50 drones per month. Its newly announced SQUALL airframe is the first drone purpose-built to come off a mobile factory line, according to the company.

Founded in 2022, Firestorm’s biggest selling point is its testing and validation. The company holds a $100 million U.S. Air Force contract, has run field exercises with Air Force Special Operations Command and the Air National Guard and raised $47 million in Series A funding.

Per Se Systems, a French firm, operates in a middle ground by building micro drone factories on trailers — instead of shipping containers — that produce up to ten drones per hour on a generator with 19 hours of autonomous operation.

Per Se has been field-tested with 12 French Army regiments and is embedded in four active development projects with the French military, according to Army Recognition.

The drawbacks of production containers

Some logistics and strategy specialists say the all-in-one package wrapped into the portable factory concept ignores some critical battlefield questions that could render the projects useless.

A container full of printers, raw materials, sensitive electronics and proprietary design files concentrates exactly the kind of capability an adversary would want to destroy or capture, according to a Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis that identified several strategic vulnerabilities in frontline drone production.

And the problems compound from there.

Airframes can be printed, but the motors, batteries, electronic speed controllers, radios and sensors that make a drone combat-capable cannot, and those components must be trucked to the container through the same supply chains the factory is supposed to bypass.

Quality control under field conditions remains untested. Vibration, temperature swings, dust and intermittent power degrade the dimensional tolerances that 3D-printed parts require, and no company has demonstrated sustained production outside a controlled environment.

“Industrial resilience is combat power,” the CSIS experts concluded. “The next war will not be won by who initially fields the most drones, but by who sustains building them at scale.”

Several countries are catching on to the growing need to invest in drone production logistics.

Five NATO nations — the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Poland — launched a joint initiative in February to develop affordable interceptor drones within a year under a program called LEAP, explicitly drawing on Ukrainian battlefield know-how to do it.

Ukraine’s experts say they are ready and willing to share their hard-earned lessons with allies, including the strategies to build a new layer of defense alongside the new weapons themselves.

“What Ukraine has built is a deep operational ecosystem across multiple domains, designed for conflicts where entirely new types of threats appear,” Brave1’s Moroz said.

“And ecosystems like this are extremely hard to copy,” he explained. “Even investing hundreds of billions or a trillion today would not easily replicate the experience, integration, and speed of iteration built over years of real combat.”

His final words of advice to allies?

“Drones are the tool. The infrastructure is the weapon.”

As the same one-way attack drones ripple across the Middle East, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Ukraine has deployed 228 counter-drone specialists across five regional partners — Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait — to help intercept incoming threats, an expansion up from roughly 201 personnel a week earlier.

Zelenskyy has framed Ukraine’s pitch in explicitly transactional terms: If partners can spare the high-end interceptors Ukraine can’t get in sufficient quantity — Patriot Advanced Capability-3 missiles — Kyiv can help fill the gap with what it can scale faster and cheaper: interceptor drones, plus the crews and tactics that make them work.

“If they give them to us, we will give them interceptors,” Zelenskyy told reporters earlier this month, describing a PAC-3-for-interceptor swap.

He argued Ukraine’s industry could produce around 2,000 interceptor drones per day — a volume that, if it can be sustained, dwarfs the annual output of many premium missile-defense lines, he later said in a speech to the British parliament, per Ukrainska Pravda.

In the first three days of the Iran war, the United States and its Gulf partners burned through more than 800 Patriot interceptors — more than Ukraine got all winter — even as U.S. forces simultaneously struck over 2,000 targets across Iran.

That dual consumption rate is why Kyiv is trying to trade a cheap layer of defense for a scarce one, Ed Arnold, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, told Military Times.

Ukraine is offering what it has learned to do at scale — stop drones — while still scrambling for what it cannot manufacture fast enough: the interceptors that matter when the threat is ballistic. Kyiv is trying to turn one shortage into leverage for the other.

PAC-3 interceptors can cost millions of dollars per shot, and production is limited.

The result is triage: Air-defense inventories are being stretched across U.S. forces and partners in the Middle East, Indo-Pacific planning, European requirements and Ukraine — leaving Kyiv stuck at the back of the line for the missiles it needs most.

“Interceptors like Patriot, forget it,” Arnold told Military Times earlier this month.

“The Ukrainians aren’t getting any more now because they’re all going to go to the U.S. military — either Middle East or Taiwan," he said.

“Out of those priorities, Ukraine is at the bottom if you’re the U.S.”

Ukraine’s alternative has become mass producing cheap, expendable drones engineered to last just a single season before replacement by a more advanced iteration for roughly the cost of a used car.

This price curve is why Ukraine’s drone ecosystem has become a strategic commodity just as the Iran conflict has expanded demand for air defense.

Kyiv says it has been fielding dozens of requests from allies for help with interceptor drones specifically, as the Middle East conflict intensifies with drones at its center.

Kyiv’s bet is that being indispensable in the Gulf also exposes it to retaliation from an enemy that has, so far, only helped Russia secondarily.

An Iranian member of parliament said March 14 that Ukraine’s support to Gulf states made it Iran’s “legitimate war target.”

For Kyiv, that kind of warning doesn’t change the logic — it underlines it: The same Shaheds that hit Ukrainian cities are now hitting partners across the Gulf, and Ukraine is betting that helping contain the threat abroad can translate into more protection at home.

The Iran war has also delivered another indirect hit to Ukraine through the disruption in energy markets that has bolstered Russian oil sales — especially after the White House suspended economic sanctions against the Kremlin to ease the crisis.

Brent crude oil has shot above $100 per barrel in recent weeks, up sharply since the war began, and analysts say higher prices expand Russia’s fiscal room to sustain a long war.

A senior official in Kyiv, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations, described the price spike as handing leverage back to Russia, right when the country appeared to have started feeling the economic strain of over four years of all-out war.

“This is throwing a massive lifeline to Putin. He can’t take full advantage yet, but within a couple of months we will see the effect hit Ukraine — and I’m worried it will be negative.”

There are other hurdles to overcome, too.

Although Kyiv may already be producing a surplus of killer flyers, there is still a bureaucratic catch that has plagued the country for years: Ukraine’s wartime export restrictions have not fully kept pace with demand.

Manufacturers are still not permitted to sell abroad without official approval, even as they field inquiries for purchases from dozens of countries.

The deployment of specialists is one way to export capability without exporting hardware — at least until permits and contracts catch up.

Kyiv says neither it nor its partners can afford a symbolic partnership any longer — not as adversaries rearm and air-defense inventories thin.

“Russia is preparing for a broader attack against the alliance in the coming years,” Adm. Pierre Vandier, NATO’s supreme allied commander transformation, said during a recent visit to Kyiv.

He argued that NATO needs to accelerate how fast it turns battlefield lessons into real capability while upping weapons production across the board.

“We are in a moment where we are in a hurry. We need to ramp up this production, and it’s a complex weapon. So it will take some time,” Vandier said.

The problem is not just capability — it is consumption: High-end interceptors are being burned faster than they can be replaced by the West.

That reality is why Arnold argues Washington should treat Ukraine’s defense industry less like a stopgap and more like a capacity it can build up.

“If the U.S. [is] going to not be able to provide any long-range strike in the future, then actually invest in Ukrainian organic production,” he said.

The weapons that could be redirected include air defense interceptor missiles purchased through a NATO initiative launched last year, under which partner countries buy U.S. arms for Kyiv, the report said.

The consideration comes as U.S. operations in the region intensify. Adm. Brad Cooper, the Central Command chief leading U.S. forces in the Middle East, on Wednesday said the U.S. had hit over 10,000 targets inside Iran and was on track to limit Iran’s ability to project power outside its borders.

A Pentagon spokesperson told the newspaper that the Defense Department would “ensure that U.S. forces and those of our allies and partners have what they need to fight and win.”

In response to a query about the report, a NATO official said members of the alliance and its partners continue to contribute to its Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) program that funds the supply of U.S. arms for Kyiv.

“Equipment is continuously flowing into Ukraine,” the official added. “The amount pledged to PURL so far is of several billion U.S. dollars and we expect more contributions to follow.”

The Pentagon and the U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said teams had been sent to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and Jordan, states that have come under fire during the Iran war.

He said that local air defense units were dealing with ballistic missiles, while Ukrainian specialists were focused on the waves of Iran’s Shahed drones.

“I believe no one has experience comparable to ours,” Zelenskyy told journalists in audio messages on a WhatsApp chat, adding that 228 Ukrainian specialists were now in the region.

“We are working with the Middle East — with leaders, at the technical level, and with ministries of defense. In general, we are preparing serious arrangements and agreements,” he said.

Ukraine opens battlefield AI data to allies in world-first move

His security council secretary Rustem Umerov has visited all five of those countries this week, and said earlier on Friday that further steps for “long-term security cooperation” had been outlined with each, without giving details.

Kyiv has said nearly a dozen countries have sought its help and advice in defending against cheap kamikaze drones, which Iran is using against its Gulf neighbors. Russia has launched similar drones at Ukraine since its 2022 invasion, and Kyiv has developed its own advanced interceptor drone capabilities.

Although Gulf states operate sophisticated U.S.-made air defense systems, the missiles they use are in short supply and they cost much more than Iran’s Shahed drones.

Moscow has bombarded Ukraine with nearly 60,000 Shaheds and similar systems. It initially bought thousands of them from Iran, before establishing its own production facilities to make them under license. Ukraine has also launched drone attacks at Russia, although on a smaller scale.

Umerov said on Friday that drone interception units were initially protecting civilian and critical infrastructure, and work was under way to expand their coverage areas.

The teams were using Ukrainian technology to counter drone attacks and partners were consulting with them, he said.

Ukraine wants money and technology in return

Zelenskyy has said Kyiv wanted money and technology in return for its help in the Middle East, adding that the United States was among nations that sought Kyiv’s help, and that Ukrainian specialists had been sent to a U.S. military base in Jordan.

U.S. President Donald Trump, who has a rocky relationship with Zelenskyy, has denied Washington needs Kyiv’s help in downing drones.

Zelenskyy said on Friday that teams from Kyiv and Washington would hold talks in the U.S. on the weekend, where they would discuss a wide-ranging drone deal and work on bilateral documents.

He did not specify which documents would be discussed, but Kyiv wants post-war security guarantees from Washington, and to agree a “prosperity plan” for economic revival after fighting ends.

Ukraine has spent a year trying to finalize a drone-cooperation package with Washington worth up to $50 billion. The proposal would see Ukraine share the innovative drone technologies it developed during the war in exchange for U.S. investment

“First and foremost, it includes naval drones and our long-range drones that have already been proven in the war,” Zelenskyy said.

He said that Ukraine was already jointly producing drones with Germany, Britain, Denmark and the Netherlands, and that it was starting to do so with Norway.

“It is important that Ukraine’s global significance in ensuring security and the quality of Ukrainian security expertise in safeguarding lives are recognised by all partners,” he wrote on Telegram.

“While Russia has enhanced its ability to operate in the Arctic by focusing on combat readiness and using dual-use technologies and facilities for defense, its war with Ukraine has limited its ability to fully achieve its Arctic ambitions,” according to the 2026 Annual Threat Assessment by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released Wednesday.

Nonetheless, Russia still views the Arctic as vital to its security for a variety of political, economic and military reasons. “Russia has the largest Arctic coastline and views itself as part of the neighborhood,” the report noted. “Russia is our primary challenge in the Arctic as it aims to further its interests in the region as part of broader global balance-of-power competition.”

US assesses China not planning to invade Taiwan in 2027

With control of about half the Arctic coastline, Russia wants to develop the region’s oil and gas reserves, as well as benefit from more maritime trade as receding polar ice creates new shipping routes.

The Arctic is also sensitive for another reason: It is seen as a safe zone for Russia’s nuclear ballistic missile submarines.

Much of Russia’s Arctic military forces are located in the Kola Peninsula, which hosts about two-thirds of the country’s second-strike nuclear capabilities, said the report, noting that the area is home to Russia’s Northern Fleet, including seven nuclear-armed ballistic missile strategic submarines.

Russia has reinforced the Northern Fleet with long-range missiles, as well as aerial and underwater drones. The Kola Peninsula also has at least three airbases that host fighters, surveillance and transport aircraft.

Another indicator of Moscow’s Arctic ambitions is Russia’s fleet of icebreakers, which is already the world’s largest, with eight nuclear-powered and 34 diesel-electric vessels. Russian President Vladimir Putin announced in January that the first nuclear-powered Leader-class icebreaker will be launched by 2030. These 70,000-ton vessels can cut through 4.3 meters of ice, according to Russian news agency TASS.

Meanwhile, the increasing U.S. focus on the Arctic has caught the Kremlin’s attention in an area that Russia views as its backyard.

“[Russia’s] activity is aimed at countering a perceived growing U.S. emphasis on expanding its influence and presence in the Arctic as a key national security strategic objective,” the report said.

A fallen superpower, Russia wants to reshape the global balance of power. The country, viewing itself as a geostrategic competitor of the U.S., “seeks a multipolar world order in which Russia reaches and maintains a privileged position, equal to that of the U.S. and other great powers, including China,” according to the report.

As for China, it also has Arctic ambitions.

“China describes itself as a polar power and is seeking to expand its presence in the Arctic including plans to incorporate the ‘Polar Silk Road’ into its Belt and Road Initiative as shipping lanes become more accessible and economically viable,” said the report.

“Beijing seeks to expand its Arctic presence using scientific research, investments, and commercial ventures along the Northern Sea Route,” according to the report, which notes that Russia and China have conducted joint patrols in the region.

Officials approved a resolution this week launching a new cooperation framework between the state, domestic defense companies and foreign partners, the Ministry of Defense announced Thursday.

“The future of warfare belongs to autonomous systems,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov wrote in a release announcing the program.

“Our objective is to increase the level of autonomy in drones and other combat platforms so they can detect targets faster, analyze battlefield conditions, and support real-time decision-making.”

The resolution comes as over a dozen countries are enmeshed in the war that started in Iran late last month, and as militaries globally accelerate investment in autonomous defense systems.

For companies building autonomous systems or target recognition software, the value is straightforward: Validated, real-world training data compresses development timelines and improves model performance in ways no laboratory environment can replicate.

For allied governments, it offers a faster path to fielding AI-enabled defense capabilities — without having to generate their own combat datasets from scratch.

Fedorov framed it as a “win-win” — partners get better training data, and Ukraine gets faster development of autonomous capabilities for its own front lines.

At the center of Ukraine’s new program is a dedicated AI platform built inside Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense Center for Innovation and Development of Defense Technologies.

The platform allows partners to train AI models on real battlefield data without gaining direct access to other sensitive military databases linked to the country’s digital control system, DELTA — a significant security safeguard.

Deputy Defense Minister Lt. Col. Yuriy Myronenko told Military Times last month that the platform’s security is built on the American National Institute of Standards and Technology standards and audited annually by Big Four consulting firms.

Ukraine’s datasets already power the DELTA battlefield management system, which uses neural networks to automatically detect ground and aerial targets in real time.

That kind of data backbone is essential in a war increasingly defined by scale, speed and AI.

“You can control only with data,” Myronenko said. “Otherwise, I don’t even know how you can control such a number of drones, people, front lines and such a number of resources. And so fast.”

Through the platform, partners can work with large volumes of labeled photo and video data collected during active combat operations, and draw from datasets that are continuously updated in almost real time as Russia’s full-scale invasion moves into its fifth year.

As a result, the country’s data may be the most operationally rich in the world right now — no other country has ever been able to offer this volume of labeled, real-world combat imagery delivered directly from the soldiers fighting an ongoing, high-intensity conventional war.

“We have built our system in such a way that the data is brought in directly by the people who are fighting,” Myronenko said. “They bring the data there, and this data is aggregated in certain forms, then centralized for us.”

Ukraine currently holds millions of annotated frames and databases gathered across tens of thousands of missions using hundreds of different types of weapons, unit formations and combinations and targeting techniques.

“We have more than 5 million drones,” the deputy minister explained. “And it’s a very difficult job to coordinate everything on such a big front line.”

Under the new framework, partners can conduct joint analytics, train their own AI models and codevelop new technological solutions using live, granular operational data.

The central challenge in military AI is not creating algorithms but testing them against real operational conditions and mission outcomes to prove they can improve decision-making in combat, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

That’s the gap Ukraine’s new data-sharing program fills — and international defense companies and allied governments have already asked for access, according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.

The timing also lands as nations across the world grapple with how to integrate artificial intelligence into defense networks securely and quickly — before their enemies do.

The United States is still working out its own rules of the road for military AI.

In January, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a memo calling for widespread AI integration across the military and demanding that AI companies make their technology available for unrestricted use, according to The Associated Press.

The high-profile battle over the use of AI in military operations and analysis is just getting started, Myronenko predicted, as warfare becomes more and more a battle of technology over all else.

“The highest risk is the absence of information,” he said.

The negotiations in Switzerland were the third round of direct talks organized by the U.S., after meetings earlier this year in Abu Dhabi that officials described as constructive but which also made no major headway. Expectations for significant progress in Geneva were low.

“The negotiations were not easy,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said after the talks broke up and he spoke briefly by phone from Kyiv with his negotiating team.

US and Russia agree to reestablish military dialogue after Ukraine talks

He earlier accused Russia of “trying to drag out negotiations” while it presses on with its invasion — an accusation he and European leaders have repeatedly made in the past.

Despite that, some progress was made on military issues although political differences remain deep, including over the future of land in eastern Ukraine that is occupied by the Russian army and that Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to keep, Zelenskyy said.

The head of the Russian delegation, Putin adviser Vladimir Medinsky, told reporters that the two days of talks in Geneva “were difficult but businesslike.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that it’s “too early” to speak about the outcome of the talks. Putin has been receiving reports about progress in Geneva, he said.

Both sides said a new round of talks is set to take place.

US will help monitor any ceasefire

Zelenskyy described the military discussions as “constructive,” adding that the armed forces of both countries considered how any future ceasefire might be monitored.

“Monitoring will definitely be carried out with participation of the American side,” he said in a voice message shared in a media group chat on WhatsApp.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, said on social media that Washington’s push for peace in Ukraine over the past year has “brought about meaningful progress,” without elaborating.

The two armies remain locked in battle on the roughly 1,250-kilometer (750-mile) front line, while Russia bombards civilian areas of Ukraine daily.

Hours after the first day of talks ended on Tuesday, Russian drones killed a woman and injured a 6-year-old girl and 18-month-old toddler in the southern Ukraine city of Zaporizhzhia, officials said.

Overnight, Russia launched one ballistic missile and 126 long-range drones at Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian air force.

Europe is involved

Zelenskyy said that the Ukrainian and American envoys in Geneva met with representatives from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland.

Europe’s participation in the process is “indispensable,” Zelenskyy said.

European leaders, mindful of Putin’s wider ambitions, say their own security is at stake in Ukraine and have insisted on being consulted in peace efforts.

Russia and Ukraine appear to still be far apart on their demands for a settlement.

Zelenskyy has offered a ceasefire and a face-to-face meeting with Putin. But Moscow wants a comprehensive agreement before committing to a truce.

Putin’s key goals remain what he declared when Russia invaded its neighbor on Feb. 24, 2022: Ukraine must renounce joining NATO, sharply reduce the size of its army and protect Russian language and culture to keep the country in Moscow’s orbit.

Additionally, Putin wants Kyiv to withdraw its forces from the four eastern regions Moscow has occupied but doesn’t fully control.

Zelenskyy says Ukraine won’t surrender land to Russia.

Novikov reported from Kyiv, Ukraine.

The decision came roughly 45 minutes before the start of the competition and ended a three-day saga where Heraskevych knew he was risking being pulled from the Games by wearing the helmet, one that the IOC says breaks rules against making statements on the field of play.

The International Bobsled and Skeleton Federation said his decision to wear the helmet was “inconsistent with the Olympic Charter and Guidelines on Athlete Expression.” He wore the helmet in training, but the IOC asked him to wear a different helmet in races. It offered concessions, such as wearing a black armband or letting him display the helmet once he was off the ice.

“I believe, deeply, the IBSF and IOC understand that I’m not violating any rules,” Heraskevych said. “Also, I would say (it’s) painful that it really looks like discrimination because many athletes already were expressing themselves. ... They didn’t face the same things. So, suddenly, just the Ukrainian athlete in this Olympic Games will be disqualified for the helmet.”

IOC President Kirsty Coventry, who was slated to be in Cortina d’Ampezzo to see Alpine skiing, went to the sliding center instead. She was waiting at the top of the track when Heraskevych arrived and they met privately. After about 10 minutes, Coventry was unable to change Heraskevych’s mind.

“We didn’t find common ground in this regard,” Heraskevych said.

Tears rolled down Coventry’s face after the meeting. The Olympic champion swimmer said she wanted a different outcome, and the IOC said its decision was made with regret.

“As you’ve all seen over the last few days, we’ve allowed for Vladyslav to use his helmet in training,” Coventry said. “No one, no one — especially me — is disagreeing with the messaging. The messaging is a powerful message. It’s a message of remembrance. It’s a message of memory and no one is disagreeing with that. The challenge that we are facing is that we wanted to ask or come up with a solution for just the field of play.”

Coventry and Heraskevych agreed that the helmet images aren’t clearly seen during races, since sliders zip down the icy chute at around 75 mph. That, the IOC hoped, was the window to a compromise. Heraskevych would not budge.

“Sadly, we’ve not been able to come to that solution,” Coventry said. “I really wanted to see him race today. It’s been an emotional morning.”

Heraskevych filed an appeal with the Court of Arbitration for Sport, but the race went on without him. The first two runs were Thursday; the last two are Friday. Heraskevych and his attorneys asked CAS for a response by Friday, though it’s not clear how his situation could be remedied at this point.

Regardless of what CAS says, if anything, his chance to race in these Games is gone. The IOC let him keep his credential, meaning he can remain at the Olympics as an athlete — just not a competing one.

About a dozen Russian athletes are being allowed to compete at the Olympics as neutral individuals along with seven Belarusians; they are not allowed to compete under their national flag or anthem. Heraskevych has spoken out about why he believes they shouldn’t be at the Olympics and said the IOC’s decision “plays along with Russian propaganda.”

The decision drew immediate condemnation from officials in Ukraine and some athletes.

“Sport shouldn’t mean amnesia, and the Olympic movement should help stop wars, not play into the hands of aggressors,” Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on social media. “Unfortunately, the decision of the International Olympic Committee to disqualify Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych says otherwise.”

In the luge team relay Thursday night, Ukraine’s six sliders all took a knee after the team crossed the finish line and hoisted their helmets — plain white ones, no designs to be found — skyward in a show of support for Heraskevych.

“Disqualified. I think that’s enough to understand what the modern IOC really is and how it disgraces the idea of the Olympic movement,” Ukrainian skier Kateryna Kotsar posted on Instagram. “Vladyslav Heraskevych, for us and for the whole world, you’re a champion. Even without starting.”

The IOC had sided with Ukraine’s top slider before. When he displayed a “No war in Ukraine” sign after his fourth and final run at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, the IOC said he was simply calling for peace and did not find him in violation of the Olympic charter.

This time, Heraskevych said he believes there are inconsistencies in how the IOC decides what statements are allowed. Among those he cited: U.S. figure skater Maxim Naumov bringing a photo of his late parents — former pairs world champions Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, who were among the 67 people killed in a plane crash on Jan. 29, 2025 — to the kiss-and-cry area after his skate in Milan this week, and Israeli skeleton athlete Jared Firestone’s decision to appear at the opening ceremony wearing a kippah that bore the names of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches killed in the 1972 attack during the Munich Games.

“A competitor literally placed the memory of the dead on his head to honor them,” Heraskevych wrote on Instagram. “I frankly do not understand how these two cases are fundamentally different.”

Firestone said simply that he admired Heraskevych. “I think he’s a man with strong values,” he said.

In Milan, IOC spokesman Mark Adams said if athletes were allowed to display messaging without restrictions on the field of play, “that would lead to a chaotic situation.”

“Sport without rules cannot function. ... If we have no rules, we have no sport,” Adams said.

Heraskevych was fourth at the world championships last year and was among the fastest in training leading into the Olympic races. A medal was possible, but to Heraskevych, the helmet mattered more.

“The International Olympic Committee destroyed our dreams,” said Mykhailo Heraskevych, the slider’s coach and father. “It’s not fair.”

High-level military communication was suspended in late 2021, as tension between Moscow and Washington rose ahead of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Trump then campaigned for a second term on promises that he would swiftly end the fighting. Many of his proposals for peace have heavily favored the Kremlin, including requiring Ukraine to cede territory to Russia.

The restored communication channel “will provide a consistent military-to-military contact as the parties continue to work towards a lasting peace,” the U.S. European Command said in a statement. The agreement emerged from a meeting between senior Russian and American military officials in the capital of the United Arab Emirates.

U.S. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, who is the commander in Europe of both U.S. and NATO forces, was in Abu Dhabi, where talks between American, Russian and Ukrainian officials on ending the war entered a second day.

Meanwhile, Moscow escalated its attacks on Ukraine’s power grid in an apparent effort to deny civilians power and to weaken public support for the fight, while hostilities continued along the roughly 1,000-kilometer (600-mile) front line snaking through eastern and southern parts of Ukraine.

An effort to ease tensions

The resumption of the military hotline marks an effort to ease tensions that soared after the start of the war and to avoid collisions between Russian and U.S. forces.

In one such incident in March 2023, the American military said it ditched an Air Force MQ-9 Reaper drone in the Black Sea after a pair of Russian fighter jets dumped fuel on it, and then one of them struck its propeller while flying in international airspace.

Moscow has denied that its warplanes hit the drone, alleging that it crashed while making a sharp maneuver. The Kremlin said its aircraft reacted to a violation of a no-fly zone Russia has established in the area near Crimea.

Moscow has repeatedly voiced concern about intelligence flights by the U.S. and other NATO aircraft over the Black Sea, and some Russian officials charged that the American surveillance flights helped gather intelligence that allowed Ukraine to strike Russian targets.

NATO members have been increasingly worried about intrusions into allied airspace. Some European officials described the incidents as Moscow testing NATO’s response.

In September, a swarm of Russian drones flew into Poland’s airspace, prompting NATO aircraft to scramble to intercept them and shoot down some of the devices. It was the first direct encounter between NATO and Moscow since the full-scale invasion. Later that month, NATO jets escorted three Russian warplanes out of Estonia’s airspace.

Russia, Ukraine exchange prisoners following talks

The delegations from Moscow and Kyiv were joined Thursday in Abu Dhabi by U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, according to Rustem Umerov, Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council chief, who was present at the meeting.

They were also at last month’s talks in the same place as the Trump administration tries to steer Russia and Ukraine toward a settlement.

Officials have provided no information about any progress in the discussions.

Following the talks on Thursday, however, Russia and Ukraine said they carried out a prisoner exchange.

The Russian Defense Ministry said it brought 157 Russian servicemen back from Ukrainian captivity, as well as three Russian nationals captured during Kyiv’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. Ukrainian officials said 150 Ukrainian servicemen and seven civilians returned from Russian captivity.

The Russian Defense Ministry said the released Russian soldiers are currently in Belarus, getting medical assistance, before being taken back to Russia “for treatment and rehabilitation.”

Ukrainian human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said that among the 150 service members who returned from Russian captivity, 18 were “illegally sentenced by Russia.” He said that “overall, those released are in a difficult psychological condition, and some are critically underweight.”

Zelenskyy says 55,000 Ukrainian troops killed in the war

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said 55,000 Ukrainian troops have died since Russia’s invasion. “And there is a large number of people whom Ukraine considers missing,” he added in an interview broadcast late Wednesday by French TV channel France 2.

The last time Zelenskyy gave a figure for battlefield deaths, in early 2025, he said 46,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed.

Zelenskyy has repeatedly said his country needs security guarantees from the U.S. and Europe to deter any postwar Russian attacks.

Ukrainians must feel that there is genuine progress toward peace and “not toward a scenario in which the Russians exploit everything to their advantage and continue their strikes,” Zelenskyy said on social media late Wednesday.

Last year saw a 31% increase in Ukrainian civilian casualties compared with 2024, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch said in a report published Wednesday.

Almost 15,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed and just over 40,000 wounded since the start of the war through last December, according to the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine.

In other developments:

Russian troops have lost access to their Starlink satellite internet terminals on the front line, Ukrainian Economic Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said Thursday, after Ukraine asked Elon Musk’s SpaceX to help deny Russia use of the service in Ukraine.

Russian forces have consequently lost command-and-control capabilities and navigation for drones, and assaults have stopped in many sectors, according to Fedorov’s adviser Serhii Beskrestnov. Russian officials made no immediate comment.

Ukraine is registering its civilian and military Starlink users on a database, allowing approved devices to function while unregistered terminals are disabled inside Ukraine.

Also, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said during a visit to Kyiv that he agreed with Zelenskyy to develop the joint production of ammunition at plants in their countries.

Zelenskyy said Poland plans to increase supplies to Ukraine of liquefied natural gas, and the countries are exploring an exchange of weaponry, with Kyiv possibly receiving Polish MiG fighter jets and Warsaw receiving Ukrainian drones.

Russia fired 183 drones and two ballistic missiles at Ukraine overnight, according to the Ukrainian air force. Three people were injured, officials said.

The Russian Defense Ministry said its air defenses downed 95 Ukrainian drones overnight over several regions, the Azov Sea and Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014.

Burrows reported from London.

On Dec. 15, the SBU published a video on its official government affiliated website reportedly showing the Sub Sea Baby drone striking a part of the Kilo-class submarine stationed at the Novorossiysk Russian naval base.

The available recording shows a major explosion around the stern area of the Russian submarine, which likely resulted in notable damage to components of the platform. However, the specifics have not been independently confirmed.

“For the first time in history, underwater drones ‘Sub Sea Baby’ blew up the Russian submarine of the class 636.3 (NATO classified as Kilo) – as a result of the explosion, it suffered critical damage and was put out of action,” the SBU wrote in a statement.

The submarine was forced to stay put in the Novorossiysk port due to the effective use of Sea Baby surface naval drones, which displaced Russian ships from Sevastopol Bay, it added.

The Russian Ministry of Defense maintains that the attack was unsuccessful and that all vessels at the naval base are intact.

The footage appears to have been taken from cameras around the port, suggesting that the Ukrainian military likely managed to infiltrate the network to surveil Russian activity inside the naval base.

Very little information is known about the capabilities and functioning of the Sub Sea Baby underwater drone; other than that it was specifically designed for the SBU. The language included in the SBU announcement frames the attack as having included multiple units of these drones.

According to an industry source in Ukraine, who wished to remain anonymous for security reasons, next to no one was aware of the operation ahead of time since the naval drone is part of non-public projects with extremely restricted access. For instance, the source noted that the manufacturer of the Sea Baby has not even gone public yet with its identity.

As noted by Naval News, the drone appears to operate as a type of autonomous torpedo, which, if true, could enable it to be guided in the direction and proximity of the target using waypoints prior to its own systems taking over and steering it independently.

“This could explain how the Sub Sea Baby was able to navigate inside the naval base and towards the submarine pen, a route that requires several turns in confined spaces,” the online platform stated in a report.

“Driscoll is a trusted voice of the administration and a close ally,” a senior U.S. official told Military Times. The official said Driscoll emerged as a key member of the negotiating team due to a twist of fate.

“As these conversations were happening, he already had plans to be on the ground in Ukraine,” the official said.

The Army secretary had arranged a trip to Ukraine to see firsthand how its military utilizes drones in combat, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss scheduling.

Driscoll then went on to deliver a version of the Trump administration’s 28-point plan for peace in Ukraine to the country’s leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in Kyiv.

By Sunday, Driscoll headed to Geneva to hold talks with a Ukrainian delegation alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio, White House envoy Steve Witkoff and other top U.S. officials.

In the subsequent days, he was dispatched to Abu Dhabi to meet with the Russians. He is expected to return to Kyiv this week, at the request of Trump, to work again with the Ukrainians.

“The talks are going well and we remain optimistic,” Driscoll’s spokesman Lt. Col. Jeff Tolbert said in a statement. “Driscoll is closely synchronized with the White House and the U.S. interagency as these talks progress.”

It is the “Army-to-Army” dynamic that the Trump administration hopes will help Driscoll establish a good rapport with officials in Kyiv and Moscow, the senior U.S. official said.

Driscoll, at 38, was sworn in this past February as the youngest-ever U.S. Army secretary.

During his military career, he led a cavalry platoon in the 10th Mountain Division and deployed to Iraq in 2009. After three and a half years of service, he departed active duty to attend Yale Law School, where he met the future vice president, JD Vance.

A trusted member in Trump’s orbit, Driscoll is a close friend of Vance, and is often referred to as the “drone guy” by the president.

He leads over one million active, Guard and Reserve soldiers, as well as more than 265,000 civilian employees, according to the Army.

Driscoll briefly held a dual role of acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, an unprecedented move for an Army secretary.

While Driscoll’s role as Army secretary typically involves bureaucratic tasks, such as overseeing budgets, he’s also taken on the challenge of diplomacy. And the president appears to be satisfied with Driscoll’s efforts so far.

“My team has made tremendous progress with respect to ending the war,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday. “In the hopes of finalizing this peace plan, I have directed my special envoy Steve Witkoff to meet with President Putin in Moscow and, at the same time, Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll will be meeting with the Ukrainians. I will be briefed on all progress made.”

The 28-point peace plan was crafted by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration and the Kremlin, without Ukraine’s involvement. It acquiesces to many Russian demands that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has categorically rejected on dozens of occasions, including giving up large pieces of territory.

Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomed the proposal late Friday, saying it “could form the basis of a final peace settlement” if the U.S. can get Ukraine and its European allies to agree.

Striking a diplomatic tone Thursday in his nightly address to the nation, Zelenskyy said his country needs a peace that ensures Russia does not invade again. He said he would work with the European Union and the Americans.

Here’s a look at key elements of the proposal and some context surrounding them.

Territorial concessions

The proposal: The plan says it will confirm Ukrainian sovereignty while also stating that Crimea and the Luhansk and Donetsk regions will be recognized as de facto Russian land, including by the United States. According to the proposal, the borders of the other two regions Russia has partially occupied and claimed as its own — Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — will be frozen along the front line.

Because Russia does not control all of Luhansk and Donetsk, the plan would, in effect, see Ukraine withdraw from areas Russia has not been able to claim in the fighting. This withdrawal zone would be considered a neutral demilitarized buffer zone, internationally recognized as belonging to Russia.

The proposal also says Russia would relinquish other territories it controls outside the five regions, which could include the northeast Sumy region, where Russian forces have crossed the border, and areas around the eastern Kharkiv region that border Russia, although the details are unclear.

The context: Zelenskyy has repeatedly stated that Ukraine will never recognize the occupied territories as part of Russia.

For Ukrainians, the main issue with the plan lies in its contradictions, said Oleksandr Merezhko, head of Ukraine’s foreign affairs parliamentary committee. It starts by guaranteeing Ukraine’s sovereignty but then lists several points that would inhibit or violate that sovereignty, he said.

The plan “is definitely a nonstarter, but I don’t rule out that it might be part of Trump’s game,” Merezhko said. “He starts with something absolutely absurd, ludicrous, which causes shock, and then he becomes more reasonable.”

Security guarantees

The proposal: The plan says Ukraine must enshrine in its constitution a commitment not to join NATO and that NATO must adopt a provision that Ukraine will not be admitted in the future. The size of the Ukrainian army would be limited to 600,000 soldiers, and NATO forces would be prohibited from being stationed in Ukraine, a measure that would curtail Kyiv’s right to choose who it cooperates with militarily.

The plan addresses Ukraine’s hopes for membership in the European Union by saying Kyiv should receive short-term preferential access to the European market while it seeks to implement reforms to reach the standards needed for EU membership, including dealing with corruption.

The plan also alludes to security guarantees from Ukraine’s Western allies but without going into detail. It is unclear how the U.S. would ensure Russia does not invade again.

The context: Zelenskyy has continually made the case that NATO membership would be the cheapest way to guarantee Ukraine’s future security. Since he took office, President Trump has made it clear that NATO membership is now off the table.

NATO’s 32 member countries said last year that Ukraine is on an “irreversible” path to membership. But some NATO members, led by the U.S., have balked at moving forward with Ukraine while the war rages and before the country’s borders are clearly demarcated.

NATO expansion

The proposal: The plan states that Russia will not invade neighboring countries, and that NATO, the world’s biggest military alliance, will not expand further.

The context: NATO’s decisions are made by consensus, and there is no majority voting. The United States is by far NATO’s biggest and most influential member. Washington has traditionally driven the agenda but has stepped back under Trump. The alliance is the one international forum where the U.S. agrees to put its military might up for negotiation and can be persuaded to act differently by its allies.

Accountability for Russian actions

The proposal: The plan also asks Ukraine to relinquish any claims to hold Russia accountable for its actions in Ukraine.

The context: This would deny thousands of Ukrainians any chance to seek reparations or legal vindication of their suffering. U.N.-backed human rights experts have said Russia’s torture of Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war is a crime against humanity.

Ukrainian political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko said signing the plan would be “catastrophic” for Zelenskyy.

“But the problem is, we can’t say no to Trump because there will fierce pressure from the White House,” he said.

He also said some parts of the plan, such as Ukraine declaring itself a neutral country or giving the Russian language an official status, would require changes to Ukraine’s constitution. Those steps could only be taken through parliament and not by Zelenskyy.

“Ukraine could offer to hold a referendum on these issues — that’s a compromise,” Fesenko said.

Russia’s frozen assets

The proposal: The plan calls for Moscow to agree that $100 billion of its frozen assets would be invested in rebuilding Ukraine.

The context: Russian officials have bristled at the idea of using frozen assets to help Ukraine. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last month that “if someone wants to steal our property, our assets, misappropriate them, and take advantage of the dividends from these assets, then, of course, those involved in this in one way or another will be prosecuted. They will all be held accountable.”

Associated Press Writer Dasha Litvinova in Tallin, Estonia, contributed to this report.

Trump’s announcement came shortly after finishing a call with Putin on Thursday. A date has not been set, but Trump said the meeting would take place in Budapest, Hungary.

“I believe great progress was made with today’s telephone conversation,” Trump wrote on social media. The two leaders previously met in Alaska in August, which did not produce a diplomatic breakthrough, a source of frustration for the U.S. leader who had expected that his longstanding relationship with Putin could pave the way to resolving a conflict that began nearly four years ago.

Key takeaways from the Trump-Putin summit

Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign affairs adviser, said the Russian president initiated the call, which he described as “very frank and trusting.” He said Putin emphasized to Trump that selling long-range Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, something that the U.S. president has publicly discussed, would “inflict significant damage to the relations between our countries.”

Trump was already scheduled to meet on Friday with Zelenskyy, who has been seeking weapons that would allow Ukrainian forces to strike deeper into Russian territory. Zelenskyy has argued such strikes would help compel Putin to take Trump’s calls for direct negotiations to end the war more seriously.

Trump tries to turn campaign promises into reality

Trump’s renewed focus on the war in Ukraine comes after forging a ceasefire that could end the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, a diplomatic accomplishment that he celebrated with a whirlwind trip to Israel and Egypt on Monday.

Ending the wars in Ukraine and Gaza was central to Trump’s campaign pitch last year, when he persistently pilloried President Joe Biden for his handling of the conflicts.

Although there has been fragile progress in Gaza, Trump has been stymied by Putin, unable to convince the Russian leader to hold direct talks with Zelenskyy.

Earlier this week in Jerusalem, in a speech to the Knesset, Trump predicted the truce in Gaza would lay the groundwork for the U.S. to help Israel and many of its Middle East neighbors normalize relations. Trump also made clear his top foreign policy priority now is ending the largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II.

“First we have to get Russia done,” Trump said, turning to his special envoy Steve Witkoff, who has also served as his administration’s chief interlocutor with Putin. “We gotta get that one done. If you don’t mind, Steve, let’s focus on Russia first. All right?”

Trump weighs Tomahawks for Ukraine

Friday’s meeting with Trump and Zelenskyy will be their fourth face-to-face encounter this year. After their initial Oval Office conversation devolved into recriminations, they’ve forged a more amicable relationship.

Trump has said he’s considering selling long-range Tomahawk missiles to Kyiv, something that Putin has said could further damage relations between Moscow and Washington.

Although such a sale would be a splashy move, it could take years to provide the equipment and training necessary for Ukraine to use Tomahawks, said Mark Montgomery, an analyst at the conservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington.

Montgomery said Ukraine could be better served in the near term with a surge of Extended Range Attack Munition, or ERAM, missiles and Army Tactical Missile System, known as ATACMS. The U.S. already approved the sale of up to 3,350 ERAMs to Kyiv earlier this year.

The Tomahawk, with a range of about 995 miles (1,600 kilometers), would allow Ukraine to strike far deeper in Russian territory than either the ERAM (about 285 miles, or 460 km) or ATACMS (about 186 miles, or 300 kilometers).

“To provide Tomahawks is as much a political decision as it is a military decision,” Montgomery said. “The ERAM is shorter range, but this can help them put pressure on Russia operationally, on their logistics, the command and control, and its force disbursement within several hundred kilometers of the front line. It can be very effective.”

Signs of White House interest in new Russia sanctions

Waiting for Trump’s blessing is legislation in the Senate that would impose steep tariffs on countries that purchase Russia’s oil, gas, uranium and other exports in an attempt to cripple Moscow economically.

Though the president hasn’t formally endorsed it — and Republican leaders do not plan to move forward without his support — the White House has shown, behind the scenes, more interest in the bill in recent weeks.

Administration officials have gone through the legislation in depth, offering line edits and requesting technical changes, according to two officials with knowledge of the discussions between the White House and the Senate. That has been interpreted on Capitol Hill as a sign that Trump is getting more serious about the legislation, sponsored by close ally Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., along with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.

A White House official said the administration is working with lawmakers to make sure that “introduced bills advance the president’s foreign policy objectives and authorities.” The official, who was granted anonymity to discuss private deliberations, said any sanctions package needs to give the president “complete flexibility.”

Associated Press writers Fatima Hussein and Didi Tang contributed to this report.

Trump posted on social media soon after meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly gathering of world leaders.

“I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form,” Trump wrote. ”With time, patience, and the financial support of Europe and, in particular, NATO, the original Borders from where this War started, is very much an option.”

The strengthened support from Trump, if it sticks, is a huge win for Zelenskyy, who has urged the American president to keep up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to end his war. It was a departure from Trump’s previous suggestions that Ukraine would never be able to reclaim all the territory that Russia has occupied since seizing the Crimean Peninsula in 2014.

That had disheartened Zelenskyy, Europeans and Ukrainians and called into question the U.S. commitment to U.N. principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity. But now, Trump’s view of the battlefield coincides more with Ukraine’s, Zelenskyy said.

“Trump is a game changer by himself,” Zelenskyy told reporters after their meeting.

Trump needles Russia about war in Ukraine

Trump, going back to his 2024 campaign, insisted he would quickly end the war, but his peace efforts appear to have stalled following a diplomatic blitz last month, when he held a summit with Putin and a White House meeting with Zelenskyy and European allies.

Trump has acknowledged, including in his U.N. speech to world leaders, that he thought a resolution to this conflict would be “the easiest” because he has had a good relationship with Putin. Trump said he is open to imposing more sanctions on Russia and urged Europe to join in.

“Russia has been fighting aimlessly for three and a half years a War that should have taken a Real Military Power less than a week to win,” Trump wrote on social media. “This is not distinguishing Russia. In fact, it is very much making them look like ‘a paper tiger.’”

In his speech to the General Assembly, Trump said the war in Ukraine was making Russia “look bad” because it was “supposed to be a quick little skirmish.”

“It shows you what leadership is, what bad leadership can do to a country,” he said. “The only question now is how many lives will be needlessly lost on both sides.”

Before meeting with Zelenskyy, Trump said the “biggest progress” toward ending the conflict “is that the Russian economy is terrible right now.” Zelenskyy said he agreed with Trump’s call for European nations to further halt imports of Russian oil and natural gas.

“We have great respect for the fight that Ukraine is putting up,” Trump told Zelenskyy, who replied that he had “good news” from the battlefield.

How Trump’s stance has shifted on Ukraine

Before his Alaska summit with Putin last month, Trump repeated that any resolution to the war would require “some land swapping.”

In talks with Zelenskyy and Europeans just afterward, Trump said Putin reiterated that he wants the Donetsk and Luhansk regions that make up the Donbas, according to European officials. Days later, Zelenskyy and prominent European leaders came to the White House.

Following those meetings, Trump announced he was arranging for direct talks between Putin and Zelenskyy. But Putin hasn’t shown any interest in meeting with Zelenskyy and Moscow has only intensified its bombardment of Ukraine.

European leaders as well as American lawmakers, including some Republican allies of Trump, have urged the president to dial up stronger sanctions on Russia.

“In the event that Russia is not ready to make a deal to end the war, then the United States is fully prepared to impose a very strong round of powerful tariffs, which would stop the bloodshed, I believe, very quickly,” Trump told the General Assembly.

However, he repeated his calls for Europe to “step it up” and stop buying Russian oil, the engine feeding Putin’s war machine.

Push for sanctions and cutting off Russian oil

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said before meeting with Trump that Europe would be imposing more sanctions and tariffs on Russia and that the bloc would be further reducing its imports of Russian energy.

Zelenskyy, speaking at a special U.N. Security Council session on Ukraine, also appealed for stronger U.S. pressure on Russia.

“Moscow fears America and always pays attention to it,” said Zelenskyy, who has had strained ties with Trump in previous sitdowns and has previously faced White House accusations that he was partly to blame for Russia’s invasion in 2022.

Russia denigrated the Security Council meeting as just the New York stop in the world tour of a “former actor,” a reference to Zelenskyy.

“There is no added value for the establishment of peace in Ukraine generated from today’s meeting,” said Dmitry Polyanskiy, Russia’s deputy ambassador to the U.N. “This will merely become yet another shameful episode in the market of hypocrisy.”

European leaders have supported Zelenskyy’s diplomatic efforts, with some alarmed by the possibility that the war could spread beyond Ukraine as they are facing what they have called Russian provocations.

“I welcome the fact that the president of the United States believes in Ukraine’s ability not only to hold the course” but to prevail, French President Emmanuel Macron said.

NATO allies will hold formal consultations at Estonia’s request on Tuesday, after the Baltic country said three Russian fighter jets entered its airspace last week without authorization.

Trump said he would back NATO countries that choose to shoot down intruding Russian planes, but said direct U.S. involvement would depend on the circumstances.

New strikes in Ukraine as toll of war grows

The full-scale war, which began on Feb. 24, 2022, is taking a heavy toll on Ukrainian civilians. Russia said it shot down three dozen Ukrainian drones heading toward Moscow, while Ukraine said Russian missiles, drones and bombs killed at least two civilians.

The U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights also said this month that Ukrainian civilian casualties increased by 40% in the first eight months of this year compared with 2024, as Russia escalated its long-range missile and localized drone strikes.

A U.N. Human Rights Office report released Tuesday described the dire situation of thousands of civilians detained by Russia in areas of Ukraine it has captured.

“Russian authorities have subjected Ukrainian civilian detainees in occupied territory to torture and ill-treatment, including sexual violence, in a widespread and systematic manner,” the report said.

Novikov reported from Kyiv, Ukraine. AP reporters Hanna Arhirova in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Farnoush Amiri at the United Nations contributed to this report.

The financial arrangement known as the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List, or PURL, pools contributions from NATO members, except the United States, to purchase American weapons, munitions and equipment.

“We received more than $2 billion from our partners specifically for the PURL program,” Zelenskyy said at a joint news conference in Kyiv with visiting European Parliament President Roberta Metsola. ”We will receive additional money in October. I think we will have somewhere around $3.5-3.6 billion.”

Zelenskyy declined to provide details of what weapons the first shipments would include, but said that they would definitely contain missiles for Patriot air defense missile systems and munitions for the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS.

An end to the war appears no closer, despite months of U.S.-led peace efforts.

The Patriot systems are vital to defend against Russian missile attacks. The HIMARS systems have significantly bolstered the Ukrainian military’s precision-strike capability.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov reaffirmed Russia’s readiness for peace talks, telling reporters on Wednesday that “we remain open for negotiations and prefer to settle the Ukrainian crisis by political and diplomatic means.”

However, Moscow has raised objections about key proposals and negotiations haven’t moved forward.

The latest Russian overnight aerial attacks caused disruption to Ukrainian rail and power services, officials said Wednesday. In addition, a Russian glide bomb struck a town in the southern Kherson region of Ukraine, wounding three women and a 3-year-old girl, regional head Oleksandr Prokudin said.

Meanwhile, a U.S.-Ukraine fund devised to spur investments in the Ukrainian mineral sector is set to launch with $150 million of seed capital, senior Ukrainian officials said Wednesday.

The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation agency will commit $75 million to the fund, with Ukraine matching that contribution, Ukrainian Economy Minister Oleksii Sobolev said.

“This is enough to launch the first significant investments,” Sobolev said, describing the fund as a “beacon” that could draw additional support from other international institutions.

The U.S.-Ukraine deal on developing the Ukrainian mineral sector was signed in April. It gives the U.S. preferential access to new Ukrainian mining projects and is meant to spur reconstruction and enable continued military aid to Ukraine from the U.S.

Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko said that the fund would initially focus on energy, infrastructure and critical mineral projects, with a goal of financing three projects by the end of 2026.

Hanna Arhirova and Illia Novikov contributed to this report.

A mixture of drone and missile attacks — as well as limited ground offensives into Russian-controlled territory — could enable the Ukrainians to break the current stalemate and affect the course of the Russia-Ukraine war, argues an August report by the Hudson Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

The Hudson target list details “eight high-value and militarily plausible targets that Ukraine should pursue to weaken Russia’s warfighting ability and increase the political cost of invading and occupying Ukrainian territory,” wrote Hudson researchers Luke Coffey and Can Kasapoğlu.

Trump’s 2-week deadline for Russia to start peace talks comes and goes

“While a single strike against any one of these targets would not by itself constitute a decisive blow, cumulatively, a sustained attack against several of them could significantly damage Russia’s military infrastructure and complicate its continued aggression,” the report argues.

The Volga-Don Canal, a 63-mile waterway connecting the Caspian and Black Seas, enables Russia to sail ships into the Black Sea, and Iran to ship weapons to Russia. Damaging the canal’s 13 locks would be difficult: Though Russian air defenses in the area are weak, Ukrainian drones and missiles would still need powerful warheads and pinpoint accuracy. However, “a successful strike would deal a major geopolitical blow to Russia as well as to the Islamic Republic,” Coffey and Kasapoğlu argue.

“Movement of military and commercial vessels between the Caspian and Black Sea would also slow and halt, causing economic disruption,” according to the report.

A joint Russo-Iranian drone factory in the Russian republic of Tatarstan manufactures most of the Iranian-designed Shahed drones that have pummeled Ukrainian cities. While Ukraine probably can’t destroy such an enormous facility through bombardment, it can target the factory’s Achilles-heel, its electrical supply.

“The factory draws electricity primarily from the Tatarstan power grid, most likely sourced from the Nizhnekamsk Thermal Power Plant — a major generator in the region,” the Hudson report noted. “Any disruption to this regional energy network could impact factory operations.”

Border crossing points between Russia and China convey Chinese electronics and other goods that sustain Russia’s military and economy. In particular, 60% of cross-border rail traffic passes through the Manzhouli–Zabaykalsk and Suifenhe–Pogranichny chokepoints. While Coffey and Kasapoğlu are careful not to advocate a Ukrainian attack on China, “there are several vulnerable and critical transit chokepoints within a 100-mile radius on the Russian side of each crossing.”

The Hudson report identified four bridges that connect Russian-occupied Crimea with Russia. In addition to the Kerch Bridge — which Ukrainian attacks have periodically damaged — the Chonhar, Syvash and Henichesk bridges are also vital to Russian logistics.

“The West should prioritize arming Ukraine with the weapons it needs to destroy, or at least incapacitate, the Kerch Bridge,” the report said. “The German Taurus missile, with its smart fuse technology and destructive warhead, remains the ideal weapon for this operation.”

Rail bridges in Russia’s Western Military District, which abuts Ukraine, were also flagged in the report. Much more than Western nations, Russia depends on rail transport to move troops and supplies. While previous attacks on trains and rail yards have achieved only limited success, destroying railway bridges, transformers and traction substations offers more promise.

“In the aftermath of such strikes, cascading bottlenecks would likely emerge across the broader rail network, creating secondary targets of opportunity for follow-on attacks,” the report noted.

The Russian naval base at Ochamchire in Abkhazia, a Russian-occupied region of Georgia, is another key target identified by Coffey and Kasapoğlu. After Ukrainian drone strikes drove the Black Sea Fleet out of Sevastopol and other Crimean ports, Russia began building a naval base at Ochamchire. The site has yet to be fortified and it is within drone range of Ukraine, so attacks could disrupt construction and “mark a significant victory for Ukraine, demonstrating its expanding strategic reach against high-value Russian targets.”

Russia’s Pacific Fleet bases were also included in the report’s target list. With Vladivostok 6,000 miles from Kyiv, hitting Pacific bases wouldn’t be easy. Coffey and Kasapoğlu suggest that Ukraine could use containerized drones launched from covert cargo ships.

“Such an ambitious attack could yield significant geopolitical dividends, even if not entirely successful,” the report said. “It would compel Russia to reassess its force protection posture across its entire naval fleet, including for assets located thousands of miles from Ukraine.

Transnistria, a Russian-supported breakaway region of Moldova, now hosts an estimated 1,500 Russian troops (Russia may bring in another 10,000 troops, the Moldovan government recently warned). Located to the southwest of Ukraine, Transnistria is surrounded by Ukrainian and Moldovan territory, and thus isolated from Russian armies in eastern Ukraine.

“Ukraine would gain leverage in escalation dominance over the Kremlin by seizing Russian-held territory in Transnistria,” Coffey and Kasapoğlu said. “In particular, such an operation would lessen the pressure on the key Ukrainian port city of Odessa.”

Of these options, attacking Transnistria is probably the most challenging. With Ukraine’s army under pressure in the east from relentless Russian attacks, mustering sufficient forces to attack west against Transnistria may be difficult.

Months of U.S.-led diplomatic efforts to stop the fighting haven’t made headway, but the stakes have risen since Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday. After that summit, Trump abandoned the requirement of reaching a ceasefire in order to hold further talks and aligned with Putin’s position that negotiations should focus on a long-term settlement instead.

The presence of several European leaders at the talks in Washington shows how central the conflict — and any settlement — is to wider security questions on the continent.

B-2, fighter jets fly over as Trump-Putin summit begins

They are looking to safeguard Ukraine and Europe more broadly from any further aggression from Moscow — but also are providing a show of support for Zelenskyy after his last visit to the White House led to an angry confrontation. The American and Ukrainian leaders are scheduled to first meet privately, without the Europeans.

On “Trump’s ultimate policy towards the Russia-Ukraine war hangs not just the future of Ukraine security, but Europe’s as well,’’ said Nigel Gould-Davies, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “The stakes could not be higher for the continent.’’

Here’s what to know about the Washington meeting.

The talks could be a pivotal moment in the war

After meeting Putin in Alaska, Trump is making a big push for a breakthrough.

A lot of issues need to be resolved, however, and the two sides have previously established red lines that are incompatible, including questions of whether Ukraine will cede any land to Russia, the future of Ukraine’s army and whether the country will have any guarantee against further Russian aggression.

In a post on social media Sunday night, Trump appeared to shift the burden for ending the war to Zelenskyy, whose country was invaded in February 2022.

“President Zelenskyy of Ukraine can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight,” he wrote.

A comprehensive peace deal could still be a long way off.

Putin wants the Donbas

As a condition for peace, the Russian leader wants Kyiv to give up the Donbas, the industrial region in eastern Ukraine that has seen some of the most intense fighting but that Russian forces have failed to capture completely.

In his Sunday night post, Trump wrote that Zelenskyy should also accept Russia’s illegal 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region.

As part of a deal, Putin has said the United States and its European allies can provide Ukraine with a security guarantee resembling NATO’s collective defense pledge, according to a senior U.S. official.

Trump envoy Steve Witkoff called that a “game-changing” step though he offered few details on how it would work.

Ukraine has long pressed for some kind of guarantee that would prevent Russia from invading again.

Ukraine won’t surrender land to Russia

Zelenskyy has rejected Putin’s demand that Ukraine surrender the Donbas region, made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, since the Ukrainian Constitution forbids giving up territory or trading land. That also means he can’t cede Crimea either.

Instead, freezing the front line — which snakes roughly 1,000 kilometers from northeastern to southeastern Ukraine — seems to be the most the Ukrainian people might accept.

Russia currently holds about 20% of Ukrainian territory.

Europe’s security is also at stake in the talks

European leaders see Ukraine’s fight as a bulwark against any Kremlin ambitions to threaten other countries in eastern Europe and beyond.

French President Emmanuel Macron described Ukraine as an “outpost of our collective defense if Russia wanted to advance again.”

“If we are weak with Russia today, we’ll be preparing the conflicts of tomorrow and they will impact the Ukrainians and — make no mistake — they can impact us, too,” Macron said Sunday.

The European political heavyweights expected in Washington are Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte.

Civilians are killed as the fighting continues

Ukraine has in recent months been losing more territory against Russia’s bigger army, and Moscow’s forces breached Ukrainian lines in a series of minor infiltrations in the Donetsk region ahead of the Alaska summit. But there is no sign of a looming, major Russian breakthrough on the front line.

Both sides have also kept up their daily long-range strikes behind the front line.

A Russian drone strike on Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, killed six people late Sunday, including an 18-month-old and a 16-year-old, according to regional head Oleh Syniehubov. The attack on the northeastern city injured 20 others, including six children, he said.

Russia’s Defense Ministry on Monday reported intercepting 23 Ukrainian drones over Russian regions and the annexed Crimean peninsula overnight.

Associated Press writer Danica Kirka in London contributed.

After about 2 1/2 hours of talks at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, the two men appeared before reporters for what had been billed as a joint news conference — but they took no questions.

“We had an extremely productive meeting and many points were agreed to, there are just a very few that are left,” Trump said. “We didn’t get there, but we have a very good chance of getting there.”

Putin, welcomed into the U.S. after being shunned by Western allies since early 2022 for ordering the invasion of Ukraine, thanked Trump for hosting the meeting and suggested with a chuckle that the next time the two sit down it could be in Moscow.

Here are key takeaways from the summit:

A warm welcome underscoring the friendly Trump-Putin relationship

Putin got a red carpet welcome and even rode in Trump’s presidential limousine from the tarmac to the summit venue. There, the pair were joined by two of their top aides: Secretary of State and national security adviser Marco Rubio and special envoy Steve Witkoff for Trump and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and national security adviser Yuri Ushakov for Putin.

Putin, who spoke first after the meeting concluded, lauded the historical relationship between the United States, Russia and the former Soviet Union, recalling joint missions conducted by the two countries during World War II.

He said the U.S. and Russia share values, a standard talking point for Russian officials when trying to woo Trump and his aides. Putin also noted that Trump has frequently said the Ukraine war wouldn’t have happened had he won the 2020 election.

“I think that would have been the case,” the Russian leader said, a comment sure to please Trump.

However, there is no indication and no way to prove that Moscow would have acted differently toward Ukraine had Democrat Joe Biden not been elected.

Trump touts progress but concedes there was no deal

Trump had gone into the meeting hoping to get Putin to agree to a ceasefire with Ukraine — or at least a commitment from Russia to enter into negotiations to reach one.

Instead, Trump conceded that “we haven’t quite got there” and said he would be conferring with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and NATO leaders about next steps.

Trump said he and Putin had made some significant progress toward the goal of ending the conflict but gave no details on what that entailed and had to acknowledge that they had been unable to bridge substantial gaps.

“I believe we had a very productive meeting,” Trump said. “We haven’t quite got there, but we’ve made some headway. So, there’s no deal until there’s a deal.”

In a subsequent conversation with Sean Hannity of Fox News Channel, Trump again offered no details on his discussions with Putin.

With diplomatic progress creeping along, time is on Putin’s side

Amid drawn-out diplomatic moves to end the war, time is appears to be on Putin’s side. That gives a leg up to Russian forces, who have used their larger numbers to slowly grind down defenses in eastern Ukraine 3 1/2 years into the conflict.

Putin got a pleasant reception from the leader of the free world on U.S. soil and walked away hours later without either providing details on what they discussed, whether a ceasefire was any closer to reality or what the next steps would be.

Putin praised Trump for the “friendly” tone of the talks — Trump said nothing publicly about the killing of Ukrainian civilians in Moscow’s attacks — and for “understanding that Russia has its own national interests.”

Putin said Moscow and Washington should “turn the page,” with relations having sunk to the lowest point since the Cold War.

Putin appearing in the U.S. for the first time in 10 years was celebrated as a sign that Moscow was no longer a pariah on the global stage. In a social media post, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told followers that the Western press would be on the verge of “losing their minds.”

“For three years, they talked about Russia’s isolation, and today they saw the red carpet being rolled out to greet the Russian president in the United States,” she said.

There were no details and no questions

Both men said the talks were “productive” but the lack of any announcement of solid achievements was revealing.

The news conference ended up being less than 15 minutes of rather standard diplomatic comments — and gave no indication that any concrete results were achieved — and offered little departure from their previous comments on the war in Ukraine.

Trump has made it a feature of his second term to parry questions from reporters in front of world leaders, but in the clearest sign of his disappointment, the president abruptly cut short his plans to take questions.

Trump had gone into the summit saying here was a 25% chance that the summit would fail and that it was meant to be a “feel-out meeting,” but he had also floated the idea of bringing Zelenskyy to Alaska for a subsequent, three-way meeting if things went well. It’s unclear what comes next.

Associated Press writers Katie Marie Davies, Dasha Litvinova and Michelle L. Price contributed to this report.

After descending from Air Force One, Trump applauded as Putin approached along a red carpet. They gripped hands for an extended period of time, with both men smiling, and Putin eventually grinned and pointed skyward, where B-2s and F-22s — military aircraft designed to oppose Russia during the Cold War — flew overhead to mark the moment at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson.

Reporters nearby yelled, “President Putin, will you stop killing civilians?” and Russia’s leader put his hand up to his ear but didn’t answer. Trump and Putin then both climbed in the U.S. presidential limo, with Putin grinning widely as the vehicle rolled past the cameras.

WATCH🔴

A B-2 Spirit stealth bomber and four F-35 fighter jets fly over Presidents Putin and Trump on the red carpet at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska. pic.twitter.com/2BGp5DqQ22

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) August 15, 2025

The pair’s chumminess, while not altogether surprising considering their longtime friendly relationship, was striking given the bloodshed and suffering in the war Putin started in Ukraine — the biggest land war in Europe since World War II. It was likely to raise concerns from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders, who fear that Trump will primarily focus on furthering U.S. interests and fail to press hard for Ukraine’s.

Zelenskyy and European leaders were excluded from Friday’s meeting, and Ukraine’s president was left posting a video address in which he expressed his hope for a “strong position from the U.S.”

“Everyone wants an honest end to the war. Ukraine is ready to work as productively as possible to end the war,” he said, later adding, “The war continues and it continues precisely because there is no order, nor any signals from Moscow, that it is preparing to end this war.”

The summit was a chance for Trump to prove he’s a master dealmaker and peacemaker. He and his allies have cast him as a heavyweight negotiator who can find a way to bring the slaughter to a close — something he used to boast he could do quickly.

For Putin, it was an opportunity to try to negotiate a deal that would cement Russia’s gains, block Kyiv’s bid to join the NATO military alliance and eventually pull Ukraine back into Moscow’s orbit.

Not meeting one-on-one anymore

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the previously planned one-on-one meeting between Trump and Putin was now a three-on-three discussion including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special envoy Steve Witkoff. Putin was joined by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov.

The change indicates that the White House is taking a more guarded approach than it did during a 2018 meeting in Helsinki, when Trump and Putin met privately just with their interpreters for two hours and where Trump shocked the world by siding with the Russian leader over U.S. intelligence officials on whether Russia meddled in the 2016 campaign.

Trump and Putin began their discussions Friday by sitting with their aides in front of a blue backdrop printed with “Alaska” and “Pursuing Peace.” Putin and Trump are expected to hold a joint press conference at the end of the summit.

Trump-Putin summit could decide the course of the Russia-Ukraine war

There are significant risks for Trump. By bringing Putin onto U.S. soil — America bought Alaska from Russia in 1867 for roughly 2 cents per acre — the president is giving him the validation he desires after his ostracization following his invasion of Ukraine 3 1/2 years ago. Zelenskyy’s exclusion is a heavy blow to the West’s policy of “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine” and invites the possibility that Trump could agree to a deal that Ukraine does not want.

Any success is far from assured since Russia and Ukraine remain far apart in their demands for peace. Putin has long resisted any temporary ceasefire, linking it to a halt in Western arms supplies and a freeze on Ukraine’s mobilization efforts, which are conditions rejected by Kyiv and its Western allies.

Trump said earlier in the week there was a 25% chance that the summit would fail, but he also floated the idea that if the meeting succeeds he could bring Zelenskyy to Alaska for a subsequent meeting with himself and Putin.

Trump has also expressed doubts about getting an immediate ceasefire, but he has wanted a broad peace deal done quickly. That seemingly echoes Putin’s longtime argument that Russia favors a comprehensive deal to end the fighting, reflecting its demands, and not a temporary halt to hostilities.

Trump has offered shifting explanations for his meeting goals

Trump previously characterized the sit-down as ““really a feel-out meeting.” But he’s also warned of “very severe consequences” for Russia if Putin doesn’t agree to end the war.

Trump said before arriving in Alaska that his talks with Putin will include Russian demands that Ukraine cede territory as part of a peace deal. He said Ukraine has to decide, but he also suggested Zelenskyy should accept concessions.

“I’ve got to let Ukraine make that decision. And I think they’ll make a proper decision,” Trump told reporters traveling with him to Alaska.

Trump said there’s “a possibility” of the United States offering Ukraine security guarantees alongside European powers, “but not in the form of NATO.” Putin has fiercely resisted Ukraine joining the trans-Atlantic security alliance, a long-term goal for Ukrainians seeking to forge stronger ties with the West.

Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, NATO’s supreme allied commander Europe, is in Alaska to provide “military advice” to Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, according to a senior NATO military official who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity. His presence is likely to be welcomed by European leaders who have tried to convince Trump to be firm with Putin and not deal over Kyiv’s head.

Potentially far-reaching implications

Foreign governments are watching closely to see how Trump reacts to Putin, likely gauging what the interaction might mean for their own dealings with the U.S. president, who has eschewed traditional diplomacy for his own transactional approach to relationships.

The meeting comes as the war has caused heavy losses on both sides and drained resources. Ukraine has held on far longer than some initially expected since the February 2022 invasion, but it is straining to hold off Russia’s much larger army, grappling with bombardments of its cities and fighting for every inch on the over 600-mile front line.

Alaska is separated from Russia at its closest point by just 3 miles and the international date line.

Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson was crucial to countering the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It continues to play a role today, as planes from the base still intercept Russian aircraft that regularly fly into U.S. airspace.

Weissert reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Matthew Lee and Jonathan J. Cooper in Washington, Elise Morton in London and Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow contributed to this report.

The meeting is scheduled to take place Friday at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, according to a White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning.

The base created by merging Elmendorf Air Force Base and Army Fort Richardson in 2010 has played a key strategic role in monitoring and deterring the Soviet Union during much of the Cold War.

Throughout its long history, the base hosted large numbers of aircraft and oversaw operations of a variety of early warning radar sites that were aimed at detecting Soviet military activity and any possible nuclear launches. It earned the motto “Top Cover for North America” at this time, according to the base website.

While much of the military hardware has since been deactivated, the base still hosts key aircraft squadrons, including the F-22 Raptor stealth fighter jet. Planes from the base also still intercept Russian aircraft that regularly fly into U.S. airspace.

The leaders’ meeting at an American military base allows them to avoid any protests and provides an important level of security, said Benjamin Jensen, senior fellow for defense and security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.

“For President Trump, it’s a great way for him to show American military strength while also isolating the ability of the public or others to intervene with what he probably hopes is a productive dialogue,” Jensen said.

He said the location means Trump can cultivate ties with Putin while “signaling military power to try to gain that bargaining advantage to make a second meeting possible.”

The irony of Putin visiting an American military base that long has — and still does — aimed to counter Russian threats comes as Trump works to reach a ceasefire deal in a war that he promised during the 2024 campaign to end quickly.

Officials from Ukraine and Europe fear that the one-on-one meeting they will not take part in could lead to an outcome that favors Russian goals.

French President Emmanuel Macron said Trump was “very clear” that the United States wants to achieve a ceasefire at the summit. Macron spoke after a virtual meeting between Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other European leaders.

Trump has said any major agreement could involve land swaps and that Zelenskyy and Putin could meet next or he could meet with both leaders.

“There’s a very good chance that we’re going to have a second meeting, which will be more productive than the first, because the first is I’m going to find out where we are and what we’re doing,” Trump told reporters Wednesday. “It’s going to be a very important meeting, but it’s setting the table for the second meeting.”

Associated Press writer Nathan Ellgren contributed to this report.