“Ukraine – Russia”

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has claimed that Vladimir Putin ‘will die soon’ amid rumours that the Russian leader is battling poor health.

Zelensky’s damning assessment of Putin’s health came during a sit-down interview with journalists in Paris following a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday.

He said: ‘He (Putin) will die soon, and that’s a fact, and it will come to an end.’

Russia and Ukraine have agreed a ceasefire in the Black Sea but the Kremlin has made it conditional on western sanctions being lifted against key Russian companies.

The White House announced that Kyiv and Moscow had agreed to “ensure safe navigation” and “eliminate the use of force” in the waters three years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Russia and Ukraine have agreed to an effective ceasefire in the Black Sea, the White House has said after talks in Saudi Arabia.

In two separate statements, the White House reported agreements with both Russia and Ukraine “to ensure safe navigation, eliminate the use of force, and prevent the use of commercial vessels for military purposes in the Black Sea”.

They also “agreed to develop measures … to ban strikes against energy facilities”, the statements said.

Georgiy Uchaykin slipped the knife from his pocket and slashed the freezing air of the shooting range in downtown Kyiv. One cutting arc, then another stab.

“Look,” said the 56-year-old chairman of the Ukrainian Gun Owners Association (UGOA). “When men come at you with a knife you don’t have much time. They move quickly.” He pointed the knife towards me. “That’s why gun owners train themselves to draw and shoot within one and a half seconds.”

Uchaykin, a bald, heavy-set man wearing jeans and T-shirt, grinned. “You can’t overstate the importance of guns.” He said he had started teaching his grandson to shoot when the boy turned seven.

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The Americans were pinned down, ­lying prone among sunflower stalks as they took rocket fire from Russian ­positions across the fields. Then, mortar burst in the air above them. All seven of Delta Team were wounded, some ­repeatedly.

“I remember looking at one sun­flower that was taller than the weeds while I was holding pressure on Dubs’ wounds, thinking we are all going to bleed out and die here,” said “Tango”, the Delta Team medic who was hit with shrapnel four times. One of the 24 shards that entered his body and sliced into the sciatic nerve in his leg.

Until just over a week ago, Artem Kariakin and his unit were making regular trips across Ukraine’s border into the Russian town of Sudzha.

He shows me video taken with a phone of their very last trip, as Ukrainian forces retreated from Russia’s Kursk region. It shows them making their way past dozens of burnt out military and civilian vehicles.

A soldier armed with a shotgun, their last line of defence, scans the horizon for Russian drones. Out of nowhere, one flies towards the back of their truck. Sparks fly, but they keep on going.

Artem says they were lucky – the explosive charge was not big enough to stop them.

Russian agents researched fire protocols at a factory owned by a German arms firm shortly before it burst into flames last summer, The Telegraph can reveal.

Western officials have long suspected that the blaze, which broke out in May 2024 at a Berlin factory owned by the Diehl group, was the work of Russian saboteurs trying to disrupt the supply chain of arms deliveries to Ukraine.

But it can now be revealed that suspected Russian agents tried to find out information about fire safety measures around the site in the run-up to the incident.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed during a lengthy call Tuesday to an immediate pause in strikes against energy and infrastructure targets in the Ukraine war, but the Russian leader stopped short of backing a broader 30-day pause in fighting that the U.S. administration is pressing for.

The White House described it as the first step in a “movement to peace” it hopes will eventually include a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea and a full and lasting end to the fighting.

President Trump is set to press his high-speed effort to bring the war in Ukraine to an end when he speaks to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday.

Trump said “a lot of work” had been done over the weekend and that the U.S. had talked to both sides about dividing up “assets,” such as land and power plants.

The White House’s rapid-fire diplomacy is up against warnings from Moscow last week that much remains to be resolved before agreeing to halt fighting.

Trump brushed aside those concerns when speaking about his plans to talk to Putin. “We want to see if we can bring that war to an end,” he told reporters on Air Force One late Sunday. “Maybe we can, maybe we can’t, but I think we have a very good chance.”

Ukrainian soldiers fighting in Russia’s Kursk region have described scenes “like a horror movie” as they retreated from the front lines.

The BBC has received extensive accounts from Ukrainian troops, who recount a “catastrophic” withdrawal in the face of heavy fire, and columns of military equipment destroyed and constant attacks from swarms of Russian drones.

The soldiers, who spoke over social media, were given aliases to protect their identity. Some gave accounts of a “collapse” as Ukraine lost Sudzha, the largest town it held.

Russia will seek guarantees that Nato will exclude Ukraine from membership and that Ukraine will remain neutral in any peace deal, a Russian deputy foreign minister said.

“We will demand that ironclad security guarantees become part of this agreement,” Alexander Grushko told Russian media outlet Izvestia.

“Part of these guarantees should be the neutral status of Ukraine, the refusal of Nato countries to accept it into the alliance,” he said.

US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin will speak in coming days, as talks continue over a possible ceasefire in the three-year war in Ukraine.

US envoy Steve Witkoff, who met with Putin on Thursday in Moscow, told CNN that he expected that “there will be a call with both presidents this week”.

“We’re also continuing to engage and have conversation with the Ukrainians,” he added. “We’re advising them on everything we’re thinking about.”

Vladimir Putin has told Donald Trump he backs the “idea” of a ceasefire in Ukraine, but he would only agree to one on his own terms.

The Russian president knocked back the US proposal for an immediate 30-day pause in the fighting on Thursday, saying he had “serious questions” about how it would be implemented that he needed to discuss with Mr Trump.

Speaking at a press conference in Moscow, Putin said he wanted any deal to “lead to long-term peace” and “eliminate the original causes of this crisis”, suggesting he was unwilling to relent on his evisceration of the Ukrainian state.