“Ukraine – Russia”

Ottawa is watching closely as U.S. President Donald Trump attempts to play peacemaker in the war in Ukraine.

Canada has volunteered to play a role in helping maintain peace in Ukraine, if a ceasefire deal can be reached between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to end the fighting that Moscow started in 2014.

The way the war ends could reverberate for decades.

WASHINGTON—The Pentagon has for months been blocking Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles to strike inside Russia, U.S. officials said, limiting Kyiv from employing a powerful weapon in its fight against Moscow’s invasion.

A high-level Defense Department approval procedure, which hasn’t been announced, has prevented Ukraine from firing any U.S.-made long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, against targets in Russia since late spring, the officials said. On at least one occasion, Ukraine sought to use ATACMS against a target on Russian territory but was rejected, two officials said.

The U.S. veto of long-range strikes has restricted Ukraine’s military operations as the White House has sought to woo the Kremlin into beginning peace talks.

Ukraine’s President Volodymr Zelensky has accused Russia of “doing everything it can” to prevent a meeting with Vladimir Putin to try to end the war.

US President Donald Trump has sought to bring the two leaders together, but he said on Friday “that’s like oil and vinegar… they don’t get along too well”.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Putin was ready to meet Ukraine’s leader “when the agenda is ready for a summit, and this agenda is not ready at all”, accusing Zelensky of saying “no to everything”.

President Trump has accused Joe Biden of making it nearly “impossible” for Ukraine to defeat Russia because he restricted Kyiv from launching cross-border strikes.

In a post on Truth Social, the US president accused Biden of not allowing Ukraine to “FIGHT BACK”. Speaking after Russia struck a US electronics company in western Ukraine, Trump promised “interesting times ahead”.

“It is very hard, if not impossible, to win a war without attacking an invader’s country. It’s like a great team in sports that has a fantastic defense, but is not allowed to play offense,” Trump wrote.

Though you wouldn’t know from the smiles around the table at the White House this week, a trap has been set by Vladimir Putin designed to split the United States from its European allies. In Washington on Monday, Europe’s leaders, plus Sir Keir Starmer and Volodymyr Zelensky, agreed with Donald Trump that the killing in Ukraine should and can be ended as soon as possible. They lavished praise on Trump for reaching out to the Kremlin, despite having themselves treated Putin as a pariah for the past three years. And they even enthusiastically applauded the notion of security guarantees similar to NATO’s Article 5 “all-for-one and one-for-all” mutual defense clause as a way to safeguard Ukraine’s borders in the future.

Volodymyr Zelensky and his European counterparts believe that any eventual peace agreement must be protected by the deployment of ground forces to Ukraine, providing “security guarantees”. The intention is that these forces would serve as a tripwire-style deterrence against a future Russian invasion five, 10 or 15 years down the line. After reconstituting Russia’s military and economy thanks to post-war sanctions relief, Vladimir Putin or his successor might then decide to attack Ukraine. But the Russian military would have to deal with Western military forces as well as those of Kyiv.

Russia has launched 574 drones and 40 missiles on Ukraine in one of the heaviest bombardments in weeks, Ukrainian officials say.

One person was killed in a drone and missile strike on the western city of Lviv, while 15 others were reported wounded in an attack on the south-western Transcarpathia region.

The attacks came as US President Donald Trump spearheads diplomatic moves to halt the war. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said the strikes highlighted why efforts to bring it to an end were “so critical”.

The main target of Russia’s overnight attack was one of the biggest American investments in Ukraine — an electronics plant or @Flexintl in Mukacheve on the Hungarian border. Hundreds of workers managed to flee to shelters just before two Russian missiles struck, according to… pic.twitter.com/4uykSa4aor

— Yaroslav Trofimov (@yarotrof) August 21, 2025

h/t Mauser

German prosecutors say a Ukrainian man has been arrested in Italy on suspicion of blowing up the Nord Stream gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea, several months after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The man, identified only as Serhii K, was arrested in the province of Rimini and was part of a group who planted explosives under the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines from Russia to Germany, federal prosecutors say.

The blasts severed a key source of natural gas for Europe when leaders were facing an energy crisis triggered by Russia’s war.

“The only way to reach a deal on anything, whether it’s in business or in politics or in geopolitics, the only way to reach a deal is for each side to get something and each side to give something,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told NBC’s Kristen Welker on Meet the Press on August 17.

Rubio, talking about the war in Ukraine, completely missed the fundamental issue: Should the United States be trying to reach a deal in the first place?

If Russian President Vladimir Putin agrees to meet his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, as urged by President Trump, he will come face-to-face with a man he has spent 3½ years excoriating as an illegitimate leader and puppet.

Negotiating directly with Zelensky would run sharply counter to the narrative Putin has carefully constructed and sold to Russians in an effort to justify his 2022 invasion of Ukraine: that the war is part of a broader conflict with the West in which Zelensky and his country are mere pawns.

Trump’s call for a meeting puts Putin in a bind. If he declines, he risks angering the U.S. president, who has already threatened him with more sanctions. But sitting down with Zelensky could damage him politically with the Russian elite and the broader public.

Trump’s strategy is clear

There are many more ways in which a peace process can fail than succeed. But for either to happen, it first needs to start. And that is often the most difficult step. But after his big summit in the White House, Donald Trump seems to have pulled off the unthinkable: a summit has been organised between Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky which would kick-start peace negotiations.

What did it take to get here? While a ceasefire will not be a pre-condition, the Europeans have been granted some of the assurances they wanted on security guarantees. Whether these can be enforced is, of course, an entirely different matter — but America’s agreement, in principle, to help the Europeans meet their obligations does mark an important shift in this seemingly endless war.

Would Trump walk away if Ukraine were to violate terms of a peace deal?

President Trump ruled out sending US military forces to Ukraine as part of any US security guarantees to the war-torn nation, but suggested he would provide some form of air protection.

Trump insisted that the American public has “my assurance” when pressed in an interview on “Fox & Friends” Tuesday morning that there “won’t be American boots on the ground defending that border” in Ukraine.

“Well, you have my assurance,” the president replied. “I’m president and I’m just trying to stop people from being killed.”