In an interview with French broadcaster TF1 on May 13, Macron discussed new Russia sanctions and stationing French nuclear weapons in other European countries as a deterrent against Russia.
Performing their song "Bird of Pray," Ukrainian band Ziferblat passed the Eurovision semi-finals on May 13, qualifying Ukraine for the grand final on May 17.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov confirmed that a Russian delegation will be in Istanbul on May 15 for direct peace talks with Ukraine. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Putin’s foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov will likely represent Russia.
The move follows Ukraine's ratification of the minerals agreement, deepening U.S.-Ukraine economic ties and signaling expanded U.S. involvement in Ukraine's long-term recovery.
"Ukraine has initiated a coordinated campaign to vilify Hungary in order to undermine our initiative to hold a poll on (Kyiv's) EU membership," Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz warned that further concessions from Ukraine during negotiations would be unreasonable if Russia continues to attack civilian targets.
U.S. President Donald Trump's special envoys, Steve Witkoff and Keith Kellogg, will travel to Istanbul for possible peace talks between Ukraine and Russia, Reuters reported on May 13, citing three undisclosed sources.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said he will meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara, but said both leaders are ready to fly to Istanbul if Russian President Vladimir Putin chooses to attend the talks there.
Illustrative purposes only: The Yandex logo is seen at the company headquarters in Moscow. (Vlad Karkov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Russia experienced one of its largest internet outages, with many sites and applications using the Russian .ru domain being unavailable for hours on the evening of Jan. 30.
Hundreds of websites and services were unaccessible, including the Yandex search engine, Sberbank, the VKontakte social media platform, as well as state services.
People all over the country were impacted by the outages. According to the state-controlled Russian news agency RBC, most issues were reported in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Krasnodar Krai, Bashkortostan, and Kostroma Oblast.
Russia's Digital Ministry said that the problems were caused by a technical issue linked to a set of DNS protocol extensions.
At around 10:20 p.m. local time, the ministry announced that the issue had been resolved, though some problems with DNS may continue until the updated data is distributed throughout the domain name system.
Russian authorities have long announced plans to transfer Russian internet users to the national national DNS server, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty noted.
On the evening of Jan. 30, Ukraine's military intelligence agency (HUR) announced that it had shut down the Russian Defense Ministry's server. This was only the latest in the recently reported cyberattacks in Russia, which included hacking of a Russian scientific research center and an IT company.
Ukraine was also targeted by such attacks. In one of the most devastating strikes, Russian hackers targeted Ukraine's telecommunications provider, Kyivstar, causing communication outages nationwide last December.
Martin Fornusek is a news editor at the Kyiv Independent. He has previously worked as a news content editor at the media company Newsmatics and is a contributor to Euromaidan Press. He was also volunteering as an editor and translator at the Czech-language version of Ukraïner. Martin studied at Masaryk University in Brno, Czechia, holding a bachelor's degree in security studies and history and a master's degree in conflict and democracy studies.
Nate Ostiller
