Ukraine war latest: Angry Trump team admit fast peace deal with Putin now unlikely

Russia launched 74 drones in an overnight attack, the Ukrainian air force said on Wednesday.

Air defences shot down 41 of these drones and 20 others did not reach their targets, likely due to electronic warfare measures. It is unclear what happened to the remaining 13 drones.

It comes after Russia did not launch an mass drone attack on civilian infrastructure for the first time overnight between Monday and Tuesday.

Officials from the Trump administration are now urging their European allies to keep buying American-made arms – just weeks after Donald Trump asked the EU to take responsibility for its own defence and security.

Five US sources familiar with the matter told Reuters that the US has made outreach to its EU allies amid recent moves by the European Union to limit US manufacturers’ participation in weapons tenders.

According to two of the sources, US secretary of state Marco Rubio said any exclusion of US companies from European tenders would be seen negatively by Washington, which those two sources interpreted as a reference to the proposed EU rules.

One northern European diplomat, who was not part of the Baltic meeting, said they had also been recently told by US officials that any exclusion from EU weapons procurements would be seen as inappropriate.

Shortly after taking office, Mr Trump urged European allies to spend more on defence and take greater responsibility for their own security, and suggesting that his commitment to Nato is not absolute.

At least one person was killed and several injured, including an infant and a 7-year-old boy, in Russia’s overnight drone attacks on Ukraine, regional officials said early today.

A 45-year-old civilian was killed and two injured in a strike on a settlement near the frontline in the Zaporizhzhia region, the governor of the southeastern Ukrainian region said on his Telegram channel.

An infant, a child and six other civilians were injured in a Russian drone attack on Kharkiv, regional officials there said, in what seemed to be the latest in a series of bombings of the city not far from Russia’s border.

Volodymyr Zelensky has said that a minerals deal that Ukraine and the US are negotiating doesn’t mention his country’s Nato membership in the future.

“As for this agreement and the Nato question, there is no mention of Nato in this agreement, and there never was,” Mr Zelensky said, confirming earlier reports.

“A decision (regarding the deal) will be made in the coming days.”

His remarks come a few days after a source in the presidential office told the Kyiv Independent that Ukraine is “not tying” the minerals deal to Nato.

A Ukrainian overnight drone attack forced the evacuation of at least 60 people when falling drone debris hit their apartment building in the Russian city of Kursk, not far from the border with Ukraine, a regional official said this morning.

“As a result of the attack of enemy drones on Kursk, there is damage to an apartment building in the city centre,” the acting governor of the Kursk region, Alexander Khinshtein, said on Telegram.

“Fortunately, there are no casualties.” The scale of the attack was not clear.

Russia’s air defence units destroyed 93 Ukrainian drones overnight, Russia’s TASS and RIA state news agencies reported this morning.

Nearly all of them, or 87, were destroyed over the Kursk region that borders Ukraine, the agencies reported.

Ukraine will hold in-depth talks with a small group of foreign countries about contributing forces to a contingent that would act as a security guarantee for the war-hit nation, Volodymyr Zelensky said.

“As far as the matter of a contingent goes, we will have a meeting on Friday. It will be a meeting of our military teams, several countries, a narrow circle of countries that will be ready to deploy a contingent in one form or another,” he said.

Mr Zelensky said he was awaiting “more concrete” answers from Kyiv’s allies on their readiness to participate in such a force, an initiative Russia strongly opposes.

The contingent would include a land component, an air component and a presence at sea, he said.

“This will be the first in-depth meeting, (before that) there were consultations. I think we will see some clarifications and some details,” Mr Zelensky said of Friday’s meeting.

He added that it was not only the contingent under discussion. “It is very important how the future of the Ukrainian army will look like,” he said.

Donald Trump must not be misled by Vladimir Putin’s “stalling tactics” to delay peace in Ukraine, outgoing German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock said during a visit to Kyiv.

“At the upcoming meeting of Nato foreign ministers, we will make it clear to the American side that we should not engage with Putin’s stalling tactics,” the 44-year-old Greens leader said in a statement released after her arrival in the Ukrainian capital.

Mr Putin is “feigning readiness to negotiate but is not moving one millimetre from his position”, she added.

Donald Trump has accused the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky of “trying to back out” of the minerals deal proposed by Washington as payback for US military aid.

“I see he’s trying to back out of the rare earth deal. And if he does that, he’s got some problems. Big, big problems,” Mr Trump told reporters aboard Air Force Once on Sunday.

“We made a deal on rare earth and now he’s saying, ‘well, you know, I want to renegotiate the deal,” he said.

Mr Trump went on: “He wants to be a member of Nato. Well, he was never going to be a member of Nato. He understands that. So if he’s looking to renegotiate the deal, he’s got big problems.”

The view has been echoed in the US among senior Trump officials brokering peace who have, for weeks, complained privately about Kyiv’s handling of the negotiations and what they view as resistance to a minerals deal with Washington and moving forward with peace talks.