Ukraine Russia war latest: Trump says Putin ‘dragging his feet’ as Moscow appears to delay Black Sea truce

Russia’s Defense Ministry says its powers have destroyed at least nine Ukrainian drones overnight, including two over the waters of the Black Sea.

The statement comes a few hours after the US said it is with Ukraine and Russia about the attacks on the Black Sea region and against each other’s energy facilities.

The officials did not mention when the Black Sea transactions would come into effect.

It was not immediately clear how many drones were launched over Russia overnight and there were no immediate reports on hits on Black Sea or energy targets.

The Russian forces have continued to fight on the Ukrainian front line on several points, but have not progressed over the past 24 hours, according to the American thinking tank, the Institute of War.

In its most important war effort in eastern Ukraine, Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Kharkiv direction yesterday by carrying out ground attacks northeast of the city, the ISW said in its latest assessment.

Russia also continued offensive operations in the Cupiansk direction, east of Kupiansk near PetropAvlivka; and southeast of Kupiansk near Stepova Novoselivka, but did not make confirmed progress.

In Donetsk, the Russian forces performed offensive surgeries northeast of Siversk near Hryhorivka and Bilohorivka, east of Siversk near Vesting, and southeast of Siversk near Ivano-Daryivka.

The Russian Defense Ministry yesterday claimed that his powers had seized Myrne, northeast of Lyman, although there was no confirmation of Ukraine.

Russia’s new ambassador to the United States Alexander Darchiev will leave for his position in Washington today, reports Russia’s state-owned Tass news agency, citing unnamed diplomatic sources.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has Mr. Darchiev, a veteran diplomat known in the past for public denial of the West, appointed ambassador to the United States on March 6.

Russia has had no ambassador to Washington since October last year when the previous envoy, Anatoly Antonov, left his post.

Ukraine’s delegation in Saudi Arabia did not fully agree to the idea of ​​lifting sanctions as a condition for a maritime ceasefire, a Ukrainian government told AP, arguing that Russia did nothing to return the financial fines.

The official also confirmed Kyiv’s objection to the exclusion of European countries of the Sanctions discussions, despite the fact that most of the European Union’s responsibility was.

Ukrainian defense Minister Rusem Umerov warned that Kyiv would see the deployment of Russian warships in the Western black sea as a ‘violation of the commitment to ensure safe navigation’ there and ‘a threat to the national safety of Ukraine’.

“In this case, Ukraine will have the full right to practice right on self -defense,” he said.

Moscow is now open to the revival of the Black Sea Delivery Agreement, but warned that its interests should be protected, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.

“We want the grain and fertilizer market to be predictable so no one is trying to ward us off,” Mr. Lavrov told Russian State Channel One Television.

“Not only because we … want to earn a legitimate profit in fair competition, but also because we are concerned about the food security situation in Africa and other countries of the global south,” he said.

But the Kremlin warned that the Black Sea Agreement could only be implemented after sanctions against the Russian Agricultural Bank and other financial organizations involved in food and fertilizer trade are lifted and that their access to the Swift system of international payments is ensured.

The US agreement, which was agreed by the Trump administration by both sides of the war, emphasizes that inspections of commercial ships would be needed to ensure that they were not used for military purposes.

The White House, in an apparent reference to Moscow’s demands, said the US would “help restore Russia’s access to the world market for export of agricultural and fertilizers, lower the cost of maritime insurance and increase access to ports and payment systems for such transactions”.

British troops sent to Ukraine as part of a planned peacekeeping force may face “legislation” legislation, Tory MPs warned.

They called on the defense secretary to create an exemption from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) for any soldiers sent to the region.

Our Whitehall editor Kate Devlin Reports:

Donald Trump said he thought Russia wanted to end his war against Ukraine, but acknowledged that Moscow did not offer progress on that front.

“I think Russia wants to see an end to it, but it may be that they drag their feet. I have done it over the years, ‘he said in an interview with Newsmax last night.

Separately, he told reporters that we were making “a lot of progress” in peace talks, while adding that there was “tremendous hostility” in the talks.

“There is a lot of hatred, as you probably can know, and it allows people to come together, mediate, arbitrate and see if we can stop it. And I think it will work,” Mr. Trump said.

In an independent premium piece, James Jones write:

If you suggest you receive the news that you are on the kill list of one of the world’s cruelest dictators, you may not be able to imagine it while holding a glass of champagne. But in January 2023, it was exactly – or almost exactly – what happened to Christo Grozev, an internationally renowned investigative journalist who I filmed for a documentary about his work for months, and who told me at a glittering awards ceremony in New York that Vladimir Putin wants him to death.

The Bulgarian-born journalist has long gone feathers at the Kremlin-his exceptional work for Bellingcat (An investigative journalism group in the Netherlands that was on the road from 2015) exposed Putin’s murder network of spies and assassins.

Known as a ‘modern sherlock’, he also unmasked the perpetrators involved in the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury and won him global awards. None of us still expected that, although the rest of the room waited for their wine to arrive, the ominous reality of the situation would be revealed. He simply said, “I can’t go home.” The message said that intelligence revealed that there could be a ‘red team’ waiting for him at home in Vienna, Austria. Now the hunter has become hunted.

By the time Grozev became one of Putin’s most popular, I followed him with a camera for more than a year. We worked on a documentary – Kill List: Hunting by Putin’s spies – which started as a story about Bellingcat.

They were unmatched in their work with the help of Open Source investigation to identify, detect and expose assassins and spies for the dictator across Europe. Over the three years we filmed, the document went much further than the short. Rather than explaining the poison program itself, the narrative changed. What we answered was what you dare when you pronounce the regime – the threats, the fear and the many human costs of putting yourself on the right path to expose the truth.

From the beginning, we took rather extreme security measures … I half convinced myself that we were over the top; That no one really cares about what we do. You feel like you’re acting in a spy film. And then police arrested part of a Bulgarian spying in the UK. And then it all got real.

“We are making a lot of progress,” Donald Trump told reporters on Tuesday, as the talks in Saudi Arabia concluded.

“There is a lot of hatred, as you can probably know, and it allows people to come together, mediate, arbitrate and see if we can stop it. And I think it will work. ‘