"I have great hope that an agreement for a ceasefire in Ukraine will be reached this weekend," German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on May 9, shortly before traveling to Kyiv alongside the leaders of France, Poland, and the U.K.
U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk will arrive in Kyiv early on May 10.
The United States embassy in Kyiv on May 9 issued a warning that Russia could launch "a potentially significant" attack in the coming days, despite Putin's self-declared Victory Day "truce."
The sanctioned oil tankers have transported over $24 billion in cargo since 2024, according to Downing Street. The U.K. has now sanctioned more shadow fleet vessels than any other country.
Washington and its partners are considering additional sanctions if the parties do not observe a ceasefire, with political and technical negotiations between Europe and the U.S. intensifying since last week, Reuters' source said.
The Kyiv Independent’s contributor Ignatius Ivlev-Yorke spent a day with a mobile team from the State Emergency Service in Nikopol in the south of Ukraine as they responded to relentless drone, artillery, and mortar strikes from Russian forces just across the Dnipro River. Nikopol is located across from the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in the city of Enerhodar.
Illustrative image: An operator controls a reusable airstrike drone called Punisher made by the Ukrainian company UA Dynamics during a test in Kyiv region on August 11, 2023, amid Russian invasion in Ukraine. (Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images)
Russia claimed on Nov. 9 that it shot down 50 Ukrainian drones in seven Russian regions overnight.
The claim comes as Ukraine, over the past several months, has intensified its efforts to strike deep into Russia using homemade drones, targeting arms depots, airfields, and oil refineries to weaken Russia's combat capabilities from a distance.
The Russian Defense Ministry claimed to have thwarted Kyiv's "attempt" to target unidentified sites with drones in Bryansk, Kursk, Novgorod, Smolensk, Tula, Oryol, and Tver oblasts. It claimed that 28 drones were shot down over Bryansk Oblast just north of Ukraine.
Ukraine has not reacted to the Russian claim as of publication time.
Despite being limited to the use of long-range kamikaze drones, Kyiv has scored some spectacular success in recent weeks.
One of the largest explosions of the full-scale invasion saw, in the words of a Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) source, an ammunition warehouse "literally wiped off the face of the earth" in Tver Oblast last month.
This came just days after Ukraine confirmed attacks on two other arms depots, with the U.K. Defense Ministry saying that the combined strikes caused "the largest loss of ammunition" in Russia during its all-out war against Ukraine.
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Chris York
