"There is no point in prolonging the killings. And I will wait for Putin on Thursday in Turkey," President Volodymyr Zelensky said.
"We cannot allow NATO's military infrastructure to get that close to our borders," Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.
This week, the world watched in anticipation for Russia’s Victory Day parade after President Volodymyr Zelensky commented that he could not guarantee the safety of those attending. Meanwhile, the European Union moves one step forward to banning Russian gas from the European continent. It is also revealed this week that U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has fallen out of step with the White House.
"(Russian) President (Vladimir) Putin... doesn't want to have a ceasefire agreement with Ukraine, but rather wants to meet on Thursday, in Turkey, to negotiate a possible end to the bloodbath. Ukraine should agree to this, immediately," U.S. President Donald Trump said.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio will travel to to Antalya, Turkey, for a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting from May 14–16, where he is expected to address the war in Ukraine and push for stronger Allied defense commitments.
Preliminary findings suggest that one of the men killed the other before taking his own life.
Western leaders dismissed the Kremlin's proposal for talks in Istanbul on May 15 as insufficient.
The Kremlin said the leaders held a detailed discussion about the Russian initiative and Erdogan expressed full support, reiterating Turkey’s readiness to provide a venue and assist in organizing the negotiations.
Erdogan told Macron that international cooperation is critical for initiating peace negotiations and the "sensitive implementation" of Ukraine’s recovery and reconstruction processes, the Turkish Presidency reported.
The pope said he was praying to God to grant the world the "miracle of peace."
Ushakov’s comments follow Russian President Vladimir Putin's May 11 invitation for direct talks with Ukraine in Istanbul starting May 15.
The assault began around 2 a.m. on May 11, with Russian forces deploying 108 Shahed-type attack drones and decoy UAVs from multiple directions, Ukraine’s Air Force said.
Zelensky called a ceasefire the essential first step toward ending the war.
China's ambassador to France says former Soviet countries have ‘no status in international law’
In an interview with Swiss journalist Darius Rochebin, Chinese ambassador to France Lu Shaye said that former Soviet countries "have no effective status in international law."
“In international law, even these ex-Soviet Union countries do not have the effective status because there is no international agreement to materialize their status of a sovereign country,” he said.
“He denies the very existence of countries like Ukraine, Lithuania, Estonia, Kazakhstan, etc.,” Antoine Bondaz, a China expert at the Paris-based think-tank Foundation for Strategic Research, wrote on Twitter.
Also, when asked whether he thinks Crimea belongs to Ukraine, the ambassador said, "it depends on how you perceive the problem," adding that "it's not that simple." He also said Crimea was "Russian at the beginning," without specifying what he meant by beginning.
Ukraine has not yet commented on the issue.
Earlier this month, however, China’s Ambassador to the European Union, Fu Cong, downplayed the Russo-Chinese partnership. Despite China’s refusal to denounce the Russian aggression against Ukraine, Fu said that his homeland is not on Russia’s side of the war.
The Chinese ambassador added that the relationship between Beijing and Moscow has been “deliberately misinterpreted.”
He also has refuted the statement of U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken from February this year that China considers supplying Russia with arms.
However, in March, the U.S. government confirmed that Chinese ammunition had been used in Ukraine, likely fired by the Russian forces.
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