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.
Russian soldiers in a armoured vehicle parade during a Victory Day military parade rehearsal on the Red square in Moscow on May 3, 2011. The parade will take place on the Red Square in Moscow on May 9, to commemorate the 1945 defeat of Nazi Germany. (Dmitry Kostyukov /AFP via Getty Images)
A secret Kremlin foreign policy document calls for Russia to leverage the war in Ukraine and exploit weaknesses in "unfriendly states" in order to forge a new global order in which the U.S. no longer plays a leading role, the Washington Post reported on April 17.
According to the paper, the document is a classified addendum to a public document titled "Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation" and was obtained via a European intelligence service.
The secret part of the document calls for an "offensive information campaign" covering multiple spheres, including "the military-political, economic and trade and informational psychological" against what the Kremlin perceives as a "coalition of unfriendly countries" led by the U.S.
"We need to continue adjusting our approach to relations with unfriendly states," it reads, adding: "It's important to create a mechanism for finding the vulnerable points of their external and internal policies with the aim of developing practical steps to weaken Russia's opponents."
The document, dated April 11, 2023, says the outcome of the war in Ukraine will "to a great degree determine the outlines of the future world order."
Despite years of increasing bellicosity from the Kremlin towards the West – including nuclear threats – the document also says Russia "does not consider itself an enemy of the West… and has no ill intentions toward it."
Just last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an interview with state-controlled media that he is "ready" to launch nuclear weapons if Western countries, in particular the U.S., commit troops to Ukraine.
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.
Alexander Khrebet
