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.
A police car drives past a destroyed building in Vovchansk, Kharkiv Oblast, on May 11, 2024. (Francis Farrell/The Kyiv Independent)
Ukraine's military said on Aug. 1 that several observations on the battlefield suggest Russia could be escalating military operations in Kharkiv Oblast.
"The situation in the operational area of the Kharkiv Group of Forces remains difficult, tense and has signs of escalating," group spokesperson Vitalii Sarantsev said on national TV, in comments reported by Ukrinform.
Russia launched the offensive in the northern part of Kharkiv Oblast back in May. The push eventually ran out of steam as Ukrainian forces halted Moscow's advance.
Sarantsev said Russian forces observed in Kharkiv Oblast were conducting internal rotations and had increased their presence in border areas.
He also said there had been an uptick in sabotage and intelligence gathering operations.
Ukraine's military acknowledged an increasingly difficult situation in the Pokrovsk direction as battlefield monitoring sites indicate steady progress of Russian troops westward.
"Today, they (Russian forces) are concentrating the largest number of personnel, the largest number of weapons and KAB bombs, everything they have, in the Pokrovsk direction," Zelensky said.
According to the president, Russia shifted its focus to the east after its failure to take Kharkiv.
Zelensky added that Russian forces also plan to advance in other directions in the east, such as Kostiantynivka, Toretsk, or Sloviansk, but at the moment, Pokrovsk remains the main focus.
Chris York is news operations editor at the Kyiv Independent. Before joining the team, he was head of news at the Kyiv Post. Previously, back in Britain, he spent nearly a decade working for HuffPost UK. He holds an MA in Conflict, Development, and Security from the University of Leeds.
Olena Zashko
