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.
Peter Szijjarto's announcement came after Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) allegedly dismantled a Hungarian military intelligence network operating in Zakarpattia Oblast.
An Airbus A321-211 aircraft of Russian airline Aeroflot in long-term parking in Geneva in March 2022. Swiss sanctions banned Aeroflot from using Swiss airspace. (Fabrice/Coffini/ AFP)
Two Russian civilian airplanes experienced technical malfunctions that resulted in emergency landings on the same day, the Russian media outlet Interfax reported on Dec. 1.
A flight from the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad to Moscow was forced to land prematurely in St. Petersburg, and another flight from Moscow to the far east city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk suffered a drop in cabin pressure and had to make an emergency landing.
No one was injured in either incident, and both planes eventually landed safely.
The incidents highlighted the increasingly apparent impact of Western sanctions on Russia's airlines, as it was not the first time that incidents involving equipment malfunction on civilian airplanes were reported.
Western sanctions have included a ban on the ability of Russian airlines or Russian-owned airplanes to use EU airspace, as well as prohibiting the export of aviation-related technology.
The impact has radically transformed the nature of Russia's airlines, forcing the vast majority of routes to become only domestic.
The safety of Russian airlines has also deteriorated as companies scramble to find spare parts.
The Russian state-controlled media Kommersant reported in May 2023 that 2,000 flights had been recorded by planes using expired parts, according to comments by Viktor Basargin, the head of the Federal Service for Supervision of Transport (Rostransnadzor).
Russia's Foreign Ministry officially filed a complaint with the U.N.'s International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) on Oct. 11, saying that the sanctions "jeopardized the safety of international civil aviation."
Nate Ostiller is a former News Editor at the Kyiv Independent. He works on special projects as a researcher and writer for The Red Line Podcast, covering Eastern Europe and Eurasia, and focused primarily on digital misinformation, memory politics, and ethnic conflict. Nate has a Master’s degree in Russian and Eurasian Studies from the University of Glasgow, and spent two years studying abroad at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Ukraine. Originally from the USA, he is currently based in Tbilisi, Georgia.
Anastasiia Lapatina
