Trump Approves New Weapons Shipments to Ukraine

The US is planning to send advanced air defence systems to Ukraine after Donald Trump signed a minerals deal with Kyiv and threatened to walk away from peace talks.

One Patriot system will be moved from Israel after undergoing refurbishments, while a second system could be sent by Germany or Greece, according to four officials.

Mr Trump paused all military deliveries to Ukraine after a row with Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. But he has since grown frustrated with Vladimir Putin’s refusal to commit to a ceasefire and has withdrawn from formal peace negotiations.

The officials, speaking to the New York Times, refused to confirm whether the proposed shipment reflected a change in the US president’s approach toward Ukraine.

Joe Biden, the former US president, secured the deal with Israel in September ahead of Mr Trump’s election win, according to a former White House official.

It comes ahead of a mooted three-day ceasefire this week while Putin’s allies are in Moscow for Victory Day. Mr Zelensky has threatened to ignore the truce after dismissing it as a “theatrical performance”.

Last year, Mr Zelensky asked Western allies for at least seven Patriot defence systems to protect Ukrainian cities from Russian missile attacks. Kyiv has eight, but only six are currently working as two are reportedly being refurbished.

A spokesman for the US national security council said it did not provide details on the strength and placement of defence systems.

“President Trump has been clear: he wants the war in Ukraine to end and the killing to stop,” he added.

Russia launched an overnight drone strike on Kyiv that left at least 11 people injured, including two children, and set several residential buildings on fire, Ukrainian officials said.

Falling debris from destroyed drones sparked several blazes in the Obolonskyi and Sviatoshynskyi districts of the capital, according to Timur Tkachenko, the head of Kyiv’s military administration.

Emergency services said dozens of firefighters were involved in extinguishing the fires raging in Kyiv overnight, as well as tackling a smaller blaze in Kyiv’s central Shevchenkivskyi district.

In an interview on Sunday, Mr Trump signalled a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine was some way off, and said he had come close to walking away from the negotiating table in the past.

“I do believe we’re closer with one party, and maybe not as close with the other. But we’ll have to see. I’d like to not say which one we’re closer to,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press.

Mr Trump declined to set a deadline on when a truce would have to be negotiated. Instead, he said he would tell both countries, “keep being stupid and keep fighting” if they proved intractable. “Sometimes I get close to it, and then positive things happen,” he added.

In an interview on Sunday, Vladimir Putin said he “hopes” he would not have to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine as he took a journalist on a tour of his private Kremlin apartment.

The Russian president said: “There has been no need to use those [nuclear] weapons... and I hope they will not be required,” in response to a question about Ukrainian strikes.

Putin hinted he was ready to use nuclear warfare in November last year after Ukraine struck Russia with Western missiles for the first time, when he signed a law allowing a nuclear response to be triggered by an attack with “conventional weapons” if it threatened the country’s “territorial integrity”.

Also on Sunday, Ukrainian forces struck an electrical equipment factory in Russia’s Bryansk region, destroying much of the plant but causing no casualties, the local governor said.

It comes as Mr Zelensky said that he did not believe that Russia would keep its promise to abide by a three-day truce starting on May 8, which is timed to coincide with Moscow’s celebrations to mark the end of the Second World War.

“This is not the first challenge, nor are these the first promises made by Russia to cease fire... We understand who we are dealing with, we do not believe them,” he said on Sunday at a press conference alongside Petr Pavel, the Czech president.

A 30-hour Easter truce was meant to take place last month, but Mr Zelensky said at the time that Moscow had breached the supposed ceasefire more than 3,000 times.

The Russian defence ministry, in turn, claimed Kyiv had launched drone and artillery attacks.