Trump says Ukraine’s Zelenskyy wants to sign mineral deal
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(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump signaled another twist in the back-and-forth over his effort to force a negotiated end to the Ukraine-Russia war during his speech Tuesday night.
As he first mentioned Ukraine 90 minutes into his address, Trump provided an update following last week’s blowup in the Oval Office between him and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Zelenskyy left the White House after the shouting match and did not sign an anticipated deal that would have given the U.S. rare minerals from Ukraine.
Trump claimed during his speech Zelenskyy sent him a letter just before his speech indicating that he was ready to come back to the negotiating table and was willing to sign the agreement to give the U.S. access to Ukraine’s rare materials.
“Nobody wants peace more than the Ukrainians, he said. My team and I stand ready to work under President Trump’s strong leadership to get a peace that lasts. We do really value how much America has done to help Ukraine,” Trump claimed the letter said.
Zelenskyy and Ukrainian officials didn’t immediately comment, The letter hasn’t been released by the White House or Ukrainian officials.
Trump indicated to top advisers he wanted to get the deal done before the speech, sources told ABC News.
ABC News’ Katherine Faulders contributed to this report.
(PUNTA CANA, Dominican Republic) — Joshua Riibe, the Minnesota college student who was with University of Pittsburgh student Sudiksha Konanki the night she went missing on a spring break trip to the Dominican Republic, said in court that he’s “ready to go home and go back to my life.”
The 22-year-old Iowa native — who has not been charged with a crime — said Konanki’s family hugged him and thanked him.
“Her mother gave me a hug and said, ‘Thank you for saving my daughter the first time,”‘ Riibe said in court Tuesday. “It was really tough.”
Riibe’s court appearance was for a habeas corpus hearing that was requested by his lawyers, who believe the 22-year-old is being detained illegally.
Prosecutors claimed in court that Riibe is a witness and is not detained.
Authorities have confiscated Riibe’s passport, and Riibe said in court that police have followed him to meals and watched him eat. Riibe’s attorneys asked to get his passport returned and to get the ability to leave the hotel without surveillance.
“I can’t go anywhere. And I really want to be able to go home, talk to my family, give them hugs, tell them I miss them,” Riibe said. “I understand I’m here to help, but it’s been 10 days and I can’t leave.”
Riibe’s father traveled to the Dominican Republic to support him. When asked by reporters if he would be able to take his son home, he replied, “I don’t even know where he’s at right now.”
“I’m just doing what I can, and at this point there’s nothing more I can do,” Riibe said during his appearance in court.
Following the court appearance on Tuesday, it was determined that Riibe will no longer be under police surveillance. However, Dominican Republic officials are not yet returning his passport.
The judge is expected to rule on the habeas corpus request on March 28.
Authorities have said they believe 20-year-old Konanki died by drowning in Punta Cana early on March 6, officials told ABC News. Her missing persons case is being treated as an accident, sources said.
Riibe — who met Konanki that night — told prosecutors the two went swimming and kissed in the ocean. He said they were then hit by a wave and pulled into the ocean by the tide, according to a transcript provided to ABC News from two Dominican Republic sources.
Riibe said he held Konanki and tried to get them out of the water.
“I was trying to make sure that she could breathe the entire time — that prevented me from breathing the entire time and I took in a lot of water,” he said.
“When I finally touched the sand, I put her in front of me. Then she got up to go get her stuff since the ocean had moved us,” Riibe told the prosecutor. “She was not out of the water since it was up to her knee. She was walking at an angle in the water.”
“The last time I saw her, I asked her if she was OK. I didn’t hear her response because I began to vomit with all the water I had swallowed,” he said. “After vomiting, I looked around and I didn’t see anyone. I thought she had taken her things and left.”
Riibe said he passed out on a beach chair and woke up hours later and returned to his hotel room.
Konanki’s family has sent a formal request to Dominican police requesting they declare their daughter dead, according to two sources with knowledge of the investigation. The parents noted Riibe was cooperating with the investigation and they acknowledged there was no evidence of foul play, the sources said.
(LONDON) — Increasingly squeezed by allies and enemies alike, Ukraine’s armed forces are still setting records in their stubborn defense against Russia’s 3-year-old invasion, which — if President Donald Trump’s peace talks bear fruit — may soon see a partial ceasefire.
Month after month, Ukraine has increased the size and scope of its drone assaults within Russia. The high watermark this month came on March 10 as Kyiv launched at least 343 drones into Russia — according to the Defense Ministry in Moscow — representing Kyiv’s largest ever such attack. More than 90 drones were shot down over Moscow, the capital’s mayor describing the assault as “massive.”
The timing was pointed, coming hours before American and Ukrainian officials gathered in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for ceasefire talks.
While straining to prove to the White House they were ready to discuss peace with Moscow, the Ukrainians were also exhibiting their ever-evolving capability to wage war deep inside Russia.
“We keep developing a lot of different types of long-range deep strikes,” Yehor Cherniv — a member of the Ukrainian Parliament and the chairman of his country’s delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly — told ABC News.
“Our capacity is growing to destroy the capacity of Russia to continue this war,” he added.
Ukraine’s strikes against Russian critical infrastructure, energy facilities, military-industrial targets and military bases have mirrored Moscow’s own long-range campaign against Ukraine. Cross-border barrages in both directions have grown in size and complexity throughout the full-scale war.
Ukrainian short-range drones are harrying Russian forces on the devastated battlefields while long-range strike craft hit targets closer to home. Kyiv this month even claimed the first successful use of its domestically produced Neptune cruise missile, with a range of 600 miles.
Since the opening of U.S.-Russian talks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Feb. 18, Russia’s Defense Ministry claims to have shot down a total of 1,879 long-range Ukrainian drones — an average of more than 53 each day. On four occasions, the ministry reported intercepting more than 100 drones over a 24-hour period.
“Ukraine is pulling every single lever that it can, as hard as it can, to get it the kind of lethal strike capability that it needs for both of those campaigns,” Nick Reynolds, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think tank in London, told ABC News.
Three years of Russia’s full-scale war have supercharged drone innovation in Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s armed forces and intelligence services have lauded what they call their “drone sanctions” — a tongue-in-cheek reference to drone attacks on Russian fossil fuel, military industrial and other infrastructure targets far beyond the front.
“Our Ukrainian production of drones and their continuous modernization are a key part of our system of deterrence against Russia, which is crucial for ensuring Ukraine’s security in the long term,” Zelenskyy said in a recent Telegram post.
Ukrainian drones have hit targets more than 700 miles inside Russia, have regularly forced the temporary closures of major Russian airports and have bombarded the power centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg. At sea, Ukraine’s naval drones have confined Russia’s fleet to the eastern portion of the Black Sea and made its bases in Crimea untenable.
It is no longer unusual for more than 100 attack drones to cross into Russian territory in the course of one night. Meanwhile, Kyiv is pushing to replace its relatively low-tech propeller-driven unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, with more jet-powered craft — potentially extending range, payload and survivability. “The number of rocket drones production will grow just like our long-range strike drones production did,” Zelenskyy said last summer.
Kyiv’s strikes have particularly disrupted Russia’s lucrative oil refining and export industry, prompting concerns abroad — including in the U.S. — that the Ukrainian campaign is driving up oil prices globally.
Federico Borsari of the Center for European Policy Analysis think tank told ABC News that Ukraine’s evolving long-range strike industry represents a “strategic advantage,” especially if Kyiv is able to protect its industrial sites from Russian strikes and stockpile weapons for future use.
“Ukraine has damaged Russian oil refining facilities hard since 2024 and destroyed several key storage bases of the artillery shells,” Pavel Luzin, a Russian political analyst at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, told ABC News. “So, the Russians are highly concerned about this.”
“The amount of financial loss and material damage is huge,” Borsari added.
Drones of all ranges are expected to serve a key role in Ukraine’s future deterrence of repeat Russian aggression. Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, for example, said Kyiv is planning a 6- to 9-mile drone “kill zone” to buffer any future post-war frontier with Russia, “making enemy advances impossible.”
Ivan Stupak, a former officer in the Security Service of Ukraine, told ABC News that Ukraine’s drone threat could also prove an important lever in ongoing negotiations with both Moscow and Washington, neither of which want continued — or expanded — drone strikes on Russian oil infrastructure and other sensitive targets.
The weapons could also be vital to future deterrence of repeat Russian aggression, Stupak said, as Ukraine pursues a “hedgehog” strategy by which the country would make itself too “prickly” for Moscow to attempt to swallow again.
Ukraine’s success has not gone unnoticed by its foreign partners. Kyiv appears to be carving out a potentially lucrative niche in providing long-range, low-cost strike platforms.
“There is immense interest from our friends around the world in Ukraine’s developments, our capabilities and our technological production,” Zelenskyy said recently.
Last fall, reports emerged indicating that Ukraine was considering lifting a wartime ban on drone exports, seeking to take advantage of growing demand worth as much as $20 billion annually, per an estimate by Ukrainian lawmaker Oleksandr Marikovskyi.
Ukraine’s military and intelligence services collaborate with domestic and international private companies to expand their drone capabilities. Kyiv has estimated there are more than 200 domestic companies working in the sector. This year, Zelenskyy wants Ukraine to produce 30,000 long-range drones and 3,000 ballistic missiles.
This month’s brief U.S. aid and intelligence freeze has raised concerns within Ukraine’s domestic drone industry, arguably one of the most insulated and resilient areas of the country’s defense sector.
“The reality is that Western-provided intelligence — and the Americans are a big part of that — does feed into a better targeting picture,” Reynolds said. “The efficiency and effectiveness is, in part, tied to that.”
“Ukraine became partly blinded as to how and where Russian anti-aircraft and electronic warfare systems are being deployed,” Stupak said.
If such a freeze is repeated, “I suppose it will be more difficult for Ukraine to avoid anti-aircraft and electronic warfare systems and maybe we will see decreased levels of successful strikes,” he said.
Ukraine’s largest drone attack of the war thus far came days after the U.S. announced its intelligence sharing freeze. It is not clear whether Ukraine used previously shared intelligence to carry out the strike, in which scores of craft reached Moscow.
Some targets are easier to find than others. Airfields — like Engels strategic bomber air base — oil refineries, ports and the like are static and their locations known to Ukrainian military planners.
Still, a lack of intelligence would make it harder for Kyiv to locate and avoid Russian defensive systems. The pause in American intelligence sharing was brief, but for Ukrainians highlighted their level of reliance on U.S. assistance.
A long-lasting paucity of intelligence would represent “an important vulnerability,” Borsari said. “For very long-range targets, they require satellite information, satellite imagery — and most of the time this information comes from Western allies.”
Hnat Holyk/Gwara Media/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images
(LONDON) — Russia launched no long-range strike drones into Ukraine on Monday night and into Tuesday morning, Ukraine’s air force said, marking the first night since December 2024 in which zero such craft targeted the country.
Ukraine’s air force reported two missiles launched into the southern Zaporizhzhia region, both of which were shot down. The air force sent out no drone warnings during the night.
The air force also said that Russia attacked frontline communities in Zaporizhzhia with five guided bombs on Monday evening, killing one person and injuring five others.
The absence of attack drones represented a notable departure from recent weeks, which have seen Russia launch massed drone attacks — often of more than 100 drones in the course of a night — against Ukrainian cities.
“There were no strike UAVs,” Andriy Kovalenko — the head of the Counter-Disinformation Center operating as part of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council — wrote on Telegram. “We are monitoring the situation, but this doesn’t mean anything yet.”
Both Kyiv and Moscow have continued to launch massed cross-border drone strikes in recent months, despite U.S. efforts to facilitate a ceasefire and eventual peace deal to end Russia’s 3-year-old invasion of its neighbor.
Last week, all three parties — the U.S., Ukraine and Russia — said they agreed to pause any attacks in the Black Sea and freeze strikes on energy infrastructure. Both Kyiv and Moscow have since accused the other of violating the pause on energy attacks.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said Tuesday that its forces downed three Ukrainian drones overnight over the territory of its western Bryansk region. The ministry also alleged that Ukrainian drones targeted energy facilities twice over the previous 24 hours.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha also accused Russia of attacking energy infrastructure, telling journalists Monday that a strike on a facility in the southern Kherson region left 45,000 residents without power.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly cited Russia’s near-nightly bombardments as evidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin has no real interest in the ceasefire and peace being proposed by President Donald Trump and his administration.
In a Sunday evening video address, Zelenskyy reported “more strikes and shelling” in seven Ukrainian regions. “The geography and brutality of Russian strikes, not just occasionally, but literally every day and night, show that Putin couldn’t care less about diplomacy,” he said.
“For several weeks now, there has been a U.S. proposal for an unconditional ceasefire,” Zelenskyy added. “And almost every day, in response to this proposal, there are Russian drones, bombs, artillery shelling and ballistic strikes.”
In recent days, Trump hinted at frustration with Moscow, telling reporters he was “very angry” at Putin after the Russian leader again criticized Zelenskyy and called for his removal in favor of a transitional government.
Trump added he would consider applying new sanctions on Russia’s lucrative oil exports and on any nations purchasing its oil. China and India are among the most significant customers for Russian oil products.
The president later told reporters on Air Force One that his administration was making significant progress toward ending the war. Asked about his relationship with Putin, Trump responded, “I don’t think he’s going to go back on his word.”
Asked if there was a deadline for Russia to agree to a ceasefire, Trump suggested there was a “psychological deadline.”
He added, “If I think they’re tapping us along, I will not be happy about it.”
