Putin ‘playing games’ with US peace talks, Zelenskyy says amid drone attack
Danylo Antoniuk/Anadolu via Getty Images
(LONDON) — President Volodymyr Zelenskyy again appealed to the U.S. to apply more pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin in pursuit of peace talks to end Moscow’s 3-year-old invasion of its neighbor — and as massed long-range drone strikes continued.
“Russian strikes are becoming increasingly brazen and large-scale every night,” Zelenskyy wrote in an evening message to Telegram, after consecutive days of intense Russian strikes involving more than 900 attack drones and missiles.
“There is no military logic in this, but it is a clear political choice — the choice of Putin, the choice of Russia — the choice to keep waging war and destroying lives,” Zelenskyy wrote.
“New and strong sanctions against Russia — from the United States, from Europe, and from all those around the world who seek peace — will serve as a guaranteed means of forcing Russia not only to cease fire, but also to show respect,” Zelenskyy said.
“Putin must start respecting those he talks to,” the president wrote. “For now, he is simply playing games with diplomacy and diplomats. That must change.”
The Ukrainian president is seeking to frame Putin as the key impediment to a peace deal, as Kyiv navigates a fractious bilateral relationship with President Donald Trump’s administration.
Months of U.S.-brokered peace talks have failed to produce a lasting ceasefire or a clear framework for a peace deal.
Trump’s building frustration has been evident. This weekend, Trump said Putin had gone “absolutely crazy,” while also rebuking Zelenskyy for causing “problems” with his public statements.
Kyiv is pushing for a 30-day ceasefire during which time peace talks can take place. Russia has so far refused the proposal.
Putin told Trump in a phone call last week that Moscow was preparing a memorandum setting out its negotiating position. But Kyiv and its European partners have accused the Kremlin of intentionally stalling discussions.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova told reporters at a Tuesday briefing that Moscow is still developing its memorandum, which she said will be sent to Kyiv as soon as it is completed.
“We expect that the Ukrainian side is doing the same work and will send us its developments simultaneously with the receipt of the Russian document,” Zakharova said.
Zelenskyy on Monday cast doubt on the Russian proposal. “They’ve already spent over a week on this,” he wrote. “They talk a lot about diplomacy. But when, in the midst of all that, there are constant Russian strikes, constant killings, relentless assaults, and even preparations for new offensives.”
Ukrainian leaders have repeatedly appealed to Trump to impose new, tougher sanctions on Moscow to push the Kremlin to downgrade its maximalist war goals. Those include the annexation of swaths of Ukrainian territory, Ukrainian demilitarization and a permanent block on the country’s accession to NATO.
Ukrainian requests have so far gone unanswered, despite Trump’s threats to introduce new sanctions to press Putin into negotiations.
Both Russia and Ukraine continued drone strikes on Monday night into Tuesday morning.
Ukraine’s air force said it shot down 43 of 60 Russian drones launched into the country, with confirmed impacts in nine locations and falling debris in three locations.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces downed 99 Ukrainian drones over seven regions.
LONDON — The “Make America Great Again” roadshow arrived in Europe this week with events in two nations where American conservatives see prime opportunities for a new transatlantic political culture — one molded by President Donald Trump’s right-wing populism and imbued with grand “clash of civilizations” rhetoric.
The Conservative Political Action Conference — CPAC — opened its week of European events on Tuesday in Jasionka, Poland, where Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was among the speakers, urging Poles to vote for right-wing presidential candidate Karol Nawrocki in this weekend’s runoff election.
Noem eschewed the diplomatic norm of non-alignment in elections in allied nations, as have other administration officials including Vice President JD Vance. “You will be the leaders that will turn Europe back to conservative values,” she told attendees in Jasionka.
“We need you to elect the right leader,” Noem said, dismissing Nawrocki’s rival — liberal Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski — as “an absolute train wreck of a leader.”
“Donald Trump is a strong leader for us, but you have an opportunity that you have just as strong of a leader in Karol if you make him the leader of this country,” Noem said.
CPAC’s next stop will be in Budapest, Hungary, on Thursday, hosted by populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban — a totem of the European anti-establishment right wing who has long enjoyed cozy relations with Trump.
Peter Kreko, the director of the Political Capital Institute in Budapest, said Orban is positioning himself as “another recipient of the MAGA soft power export.”
“Orban is still positioning himself as someone who is exporting his campaign tactics, who can help others in terms of campaign consultancy and provide help from the United States,” Kreko said. “He’s trading off of his good partnership with Donald Trump.”
On the web page promoting CPAC’s Hungary event, the organization hit out at “corrupt elites” who it said “betray all that once made us great: patriotic virtue has been replaced by internationalism, common sense by bureaucracy and tradition by woke madness.”
“People on both sides of the Atlantic have risen up against this repackaged version of socialism, but success can only be complete when the tides of change converge and the age of patriotism begins at both poles of the West,” CPAC wrote.
Internationalism is front and center in the CPAC event agendas. Among the speakers in Budapest will be American conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, Yair Netanyahu — the son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain’s far-right Vox party.
Also attending will be a host of other European conservative politicians from Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Denmark, France, Estonia and Greece — among others.
“With the triumph of Donald Trump and the rise of the European Right, the Age of the Patriots of Western Civilization has begun — CPAC Hungary 2025 will be the hub of this movement,” the organizing website said.
But the CPAC events come at a moment of peril for transatlantic relations. Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs threaten to touch off a costly trade war with the European Union.
Trump has made no secret of his disdain for the bloc. “Now we’re going to charge the European Union,” Trump said when unveiling his tariff plans in April. “They’re very tough. Very, very tough traders. You know, you think of the European Union, very friendly. They rip us off. It’s so sad to see. It’s so pathetic.”
Trump announced last weekend that his planned 50% tariffs on EU goods would be delayed into July. But the bloc remains on a collision course with the Trump administration.
The economic and political aspirations of all EU leaders rely heavily on the bloc’s own fortunes, even for those populist leaders like Orban who so often define themselves in opposition to the grand European project.
The president’s European offensive could yet sour budding ties between the MAGA movement and its foreign allies, if the latter’s “core interests appear directly threatened by Trumpism,” Celia Belin, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and head of its Paris office, told ABC News.
Kati Piri, Hungarian-born member of the Dutch parliament and the Labour Party’s spokesperson for foreign affairs, migration and asylum, told ABC News in a statement that “Trump’s unilateralist policies are designed to hurt all Europeans, and that so-called allies will not be spared.”
“Trump’s continued threats of tariffs on EU products and global trade wars are making him an unpopular friend to have — and this is fragmenting the unity of the global right,” Piri suggested.
The glitz and glamour of CPAC’s Budapest event will be welcome for Orban, Kreko said, as the prime minister grapples with his own domestic challenges — not least the meteoric rise of liberal opposition leader Peter Magyar.
Around 10,000 people rallied in Budapest earlier this month to protest government plans to restrict the rights of independent media organizations — the latest in a wave of large protests against Orban and his Fidesz party government.
Kreko said Orban’s popularity is flagging after 15 years of uninterrupted power, even as he positions himself at the forefront of the nascent right-wing “illiberal international.”
“Orban is nowhere as popular as he was, let’s say in 2022, when he won the last elections,” Kreko said. “His popularity is waning, he is having a hard time getting it back and he also uses increasingly authoritarian tools to be able to keep power.”
“He has a hard time at home persuading his own constituency that the regime he is promoting all over the world is as powerful, as beautiful, as successful as it is seen by the MAGA camp in the United States,” Kreko added.
Trump’s America has become the center of gravity of the global right-wing movement — with the weight of the federal government and the broader national conservative movement behind it.
This week Samuel Samson — a senior advisor for the State Department’s Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor — gave an indication of the prevailing winds in American transatlantic policy, publishing an article setting out “the need for civilizational allies in Europe.”
Claiming the existence of “an aggressive campaign against Western civilization itself,” Samson accused European governments of having “devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.”
Opening the CPAC event in Poland on Tuesday, chairman Matt Schlapp told attendees, “The globalists intend to take each one of us out one by one — to shame us, to silence us, to bankrupt us, to ruin us, to make our kids turn against us.”
That is why, he said, it was important to “win all these elections, including in Poland, that are so important to the freedom of people everywhere.”
For now, Kreko suggested the transatlantic MAGA project is incomplete, as did recent election results in Romania, Portugal and the first round of Poland’s presidential vote in which conservative and far-right candidates did not win power.
“What is common between Trump, Orban and many others in central and eastern Europe is that they really want to build this illiberal international,” Kreko said.
“But at the same time, we also have to be careful about overestimating its impact,” he said.
(LONDON) — The U.S. and Ukrainian governments touted the signing of a controversial minerals sharing deal as a launchpad for expansive bilateral economic cooperation — and as a signal of America’s long-term investment in a free Ukraine.
American and Ukrainian representatives signed the accord in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday after months of tense negotiations, President Donald Trump long having framed the proposal as means to recoup more than $100 billion worth of aid given to Kyiv since Russia launched its invasion three years ago.
“This partnership allows the United States to invest alongside Ukraine to unlock Ukraine’s growth assets, mobilize American talent, capital and governance standards that will improve Ukraine’s investment climate and accelerate Ukraine’s economic recovery,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a video announcing the deal.
Details of the agreement were later shared online by some members of Ukraine’s parliament, with Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal expected to present the deal to the body — known as the Rada — on Thursday. Shmyhal this week previewed some parts of the agreement, saying it would not undermine Ukraine’s potential for accession to the European Union.
The draft published by lawmakers does not include any explicit U.S. security guarantees — long one of Kyiv’s primary demands. However, the agreement “guarantees new deliveries of American weapons, including air defense systems — their cost will be credited to a joint fund,” according to Mykhailo Podolyak, an advisor to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Thursday that the deal “marks an important milestone in Ukraine-U.S. strategic partnership aimed at strengthening Ukraine’s economy and security.”
Podolyak said the deal meant “Moscow has lost: Putin’s attempt to offer the U.S. a stake in the occupied Donbas’ mineral wealth has failed. We are strengthening alliances, securing resources to continue our resistance and forcing the world to see Ukraine as an equal player.”
“To sum up, the key outcome of this agreement is that the world’s leading power has become a co-investor in Ukraine,” Podolyak wrote.
The deal will need to be ratified by the Ukrainian parliament, members of which suggested on Thursday it was too early to fully evaluate the agreement.
“Judging by the statement of the prime minister, it is better than the initial version,” Oleksandr Merezhko, a lawmaker representing Zelenskyy’s party and the chair of the parliament’s foreign affairs committee, told ABC News.
“It seems like we have managed to dodge Trump’s idea to turn the previously-provided U.S. military and material aid into Ukrainian debts,” he added.
The lawmaker suggested it was too early to say whether the deal represented a win for both Kyiv and Washington.
“It seems like Trump put pressure on us in an attempt to get a victory in his first 100 days in office,” Merezhko said. “The devil is in the details. But politically there are upsides. First, we have improved relations with Trump for whom it’s a win.”
Other members of parliament suggested that ratification would not be immediate. “I would really like to see the final document of the agreement,” lawmaker Oleksiy Goncharenko wrote on Telegram.
Lawmaker Yaroslav Zheleznyak, meanwhile, suggested it may take until mid-May for the parliament to vote on the minerals agreement — “and that’s only if everything is submitted to the Rada on time,” he wrote on Telegram.
In Russia, Dmitry Medvedev — the former president and prime minister now serving as the deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council — framed the deal as a defeat for Kyiv.
“Trump has broken the Kyiv regime into paying for American aid with minerals,” Medvedev — who through Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has become known for his hawkish statements — wrote on Telegram. “Now they will have to pay for military supplies with the national wealth of a disappearing country,” he wrote.
Nonetheless, Bessent said the agreement “clearly to Russian leadership that the Trump administration is committed to a peace process centered on a free, sovereign and prosperous Ukraine over the long term, it’s time for this cruel and senseless war to end the killing must stop.”
Bessent also said this deal was because of “President Trump’s tireless efforts to secure a lasting peace.”
ABC News’ Oleksiy Pshemyskiy, Nataliia Popova and Michelle Stoddart contributed to this report.
(LONDON) — Gazans camped out close to a humanitarian aid distribution site near the city of Rafah on Wednesday night, as a controversial U.S.- and Israel-backed project to distribute food in the devastated Palestinian territory expanded.
Local journalists told ABC News that thousands of people gathered at the site northeast of Rafah in the hope of receiving food aid, but there was not enough to satisfy demand when distribution began on Thursday.
The site is located close to the Morag corridor — a strip of land controlled by the Israel Defense Forces separating the Gazan cities of Rafah and Khan Younis.
Videos from the site showed large crowds of Gazans rushing to collect aid, carrying boxes stamped with the mark of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF — which is directing the aid distribution in collaboration with the American and Israeli governments.
“It is very difficult, we want to eat, we want to live — what should we do?” one man said when speaking with Reuters.
Another man left the site empty-handed, telling Reuters, “Every time I go, I hold a box, a hundred people crowd over me, 300. I could not take anything.”
Meanwhile, Israeli strikes continued across the strip. The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry said Thursday that 67 people were killed and 184 people injured by Israeli action over the previous 24 hours.
The latest casualties bring the total toll in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, to 54,249 people killed and 123,492 injured, the ministry said.
The Israeli government had been implementing a blockade on all humanitarian aid being sent into Gaza since March 2. The blockade was instituted to pressure Hamas to release the remaining hostages, Israel said. Hamas still holds 58 hostages, with about one-third of them believed to be alive, according to The Associated Press.
The blockade has caused widespread malnutrition and conditions likely to lead to famine, according to the U.N. and other international aid organizations. Two million people in the Gaza Strip face “extreme hunger and famine without immediate action,” the U.N.’s World Food Programme, or WFP, said last week.
Last week, Israel began allowing small amounts of humanitarian aid to enter Gaza, approving GHF’s responsibility for distribution. Israel had demanded a new aid distribution system, having accused Hamas of previously siphoning off aid.
GHF — launched earlier this year and run by U.S. security contractors, former military officers and humanitarian workers — has set up a handful of hubs protected by armed contractors close to IDF positions. Gazans have been told to travel to the hubs to collect aid.
The United Nations and other humanitarian aid groups have refused to take part in the new effort, citing concerns that it will allow Israel to control — and weaponize — aid supply.
WFP, for example, said it “cannot safely operate under a distribution system that limits the number of bakeries and sites where Gaza’s population can access food. WFP and its partners must also be allowed to distribute food parcels directly to families — the most effective way to prevent widespread starvation.”
GHF Executive Director Jake Wood resigned earlier this week, saying in a statement it had become “clear that it is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon.”
GHF on Wednesday denied reports that it was forced to pause operations after thousands of Palestinians overran one of its aid distribution sites in Gaza on Tuesday.
The group said its “operations will continue to scale up” on Thursday, having distributed a total of eight trucks worth of aid — enough for 378,262 meals — on Wednesday.
GHF later said that three of its sites were operational on Thursday, distributing around 997,920 meals. That brought the total number of meals distributed to approximately 1,838,182, GHF’s statement said.
However, multiple aid organizations and nongovernmental organizations have said the aid distributed so far is just a drop in the bucket compared to what is needed.
ABC News’ Helena Skinner, Diaa Ostaz, Joe Simonetti, Nadine El-Bawab, Camilla Alcini and Will Gretsky contributed to this report.
