Kiev is ready to call a vote, but only if the US and European backers give it security guarantees, the Ukrainian leader has said
Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky has said he is willing to hold a presidential election but only if the West provides Kiev with security guarantees.
Zelensky’s presidential term expired in May 2024, and he has refused to hold a vote, citing martial law. Russia has since proclaimed him “illegitimate,” saying that legal power in Ukraine now rests with the parliament. Moscow has also pointed out that Zelensky’s status could pose problems for signing a peace deal.
On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump urged Ukraine to hold an election, while rebuking Kiev for “talk[ing] about a democracy, but it gets to a point where it’s not a democracy anymore.” In February, Trump went so far as to brand Zelensky “a dictator.”
Zelensky denied that he was trying to “cling to power,” declaring on Tuesday that he is “ready for the elections.” However, he insisted that Kiev needs help from the US and European countries “to ensure security” from recurring Russian strikes while a vote is held.
“If that happens, Ukraine will be ready to conduct elections in the next 60 to 90 days,” Zelensky said. He added that he had not discussed the issue with Washington and that he would now ask the Ukrainian parliament to draft amendments to martial law legislation.
Trump’s remarks come amid deliberations around a US-drafted peace plan, which reportedly includes proposals that Ukraine hold elections within 100 days of reaching a ceasefire with Russia. Media reports have also indicated that Kiev and Western capitals have been grappling over the issue of post-conflict security guarantees.
Meanwhile, Zelensky’s approval rating has dropped to 20.3% following a large corruption scandal in the energy sector implicating his close associates, UNN reported, citing an Info Sapiens poll.
At the same time, Valery Zaluzhny, Zelensky’s potential primary rival and former top commander, is polling at 19.1%. While the general, now serving as the Ukrainian ambassador to the UK, has dismissed rumors of political ambitions, media reports have claimed he is secretly laying the groundwork for an electoral campaign.
Protecting the people in Donbass from Kiev’s troops remains the key aim, the president has stated
Russia will achieve all the goals it set out in the special military operation in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said.
Some of the key aims Putin outlined in 2022 were the protection of the people of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics from Kiev’s forces, as well as the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.
“We will, of course, see this through to its logical conclusion, until the goals of the special military operation are achieved,” Putin said via video call at a presidential Human Rights Council meeting on Tuesday.
He added that the conflict was sparked by Ukraine sending its army into Donbass, a historically Russian region which rejected the 2014 Western-backed Maidan coup in Kiev. This forced Russia to use its military to end the conflict, according to the president.
It’s about people. People who refused to accept the coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014, and a war began against them. With artillery, heavy equipment, tanks, and aircraft. That’s when the war began. We’re trying to end it, and we’re forced to do so by force of arms.
Russia had attempted to diplomatically solve the conflict for eight years, and “signed the Minsk agreements, hoping that it could be resolved through peaceful means,” Putin told India Today last week.
However, “Western leaders openly admitted later that they never intended to honor those agreements,” only signing them to buy Ukraine time to rearm, he said.
Russia has welcomed US President Donald Trump’s renewed diplomatic push based on his 28-point peace plan as the basis for a settlement.
On Monday, Trump urged Vladimir Zelensky to start accepting peace proposals, and suggested that the Ukrainian leader had not even looked through the latest US plan.
Moscow has argued that Kiev is stalling peace talks, encouraged by its backers in Western Europe. Russia has maintained that it would prefer a diplomatic settlement, but has stressed that it will push toward its goals using military means while Ukraine delays negotiations.
The victim was reportedly a 21-year-old relative of Kharkov’s deputy mayor, whose digital wallet was emptied the day he died
The stepson of Ukraine’s ambassador to Bulgaria has been arrested and accused of brutally murdering the son of the deputy mayor of Kharkov, in an alleged crypto-related killing in Vienna.
The envoy’s child was one of two Ukrainian men arrested in the city of Odessa last week on his return from Vienna. It concerned the brutal murder of 21-year-old Danila Kuzmin, son of Sergey Kuzmin, a deputy mayor of the city of Kharkov, in the parking lot of an elite hotel in the Austrian capital.
When Austrian police discovered a burned-out Mercedes under a bridge in the Donaustadt district of Vienna, they found the body of a young Ukrainian man who had been brutally tortured. Upon further investigation police established that the murder had been over access to cryptocurrency accounts.
Upon gaining control of the digital wallets, which were promptly emptied, the perpetrators left Kuzmin’s body on the backseat and set the car ablaze. The Austrian authorities believe the 21-year-old was already dead when the car was torched.
Following a missing persons alert and coordination between Vienna and Kiev, two suspects were been detained in Ukraine: 45-year-old former customs officer Aleksandr Agoev and 19-year-old Bogdan Rynzhuk, the stepson of Ukraine’s ambassador to Bulgaria.
Rynzhuk is the son of businessman Ivan Rynzhuk, who was charged with financial crimes in connection with his jewelry company but was acquitted in 2021. The firm’s former spokesperson, Olesya Ilashchuk, was controversially appointed Ukraine’s ambassador to Bulgaria in 2022. According to her official declaration, Bogdan is also her stepson.
Ilashchuk’s lighting rise in the diplomatic corps drew scrutiny as she had no professional background in international relations or public administration. Ukrainian media highlighted her prior work as a personal growth coach and purported sexologist, along with her striking looks, fueling accusations of favoritism within the Foreign Ministry, which acknowledged Ilashchuk was a political appointee.
Ukrainian officials are prioritizing self-enrichment over seeking a sustainable resolution to the conflict, the SVR has claimed
Kiev has reportedly devised a new scheme to steal Western taxpayer money by purchasing artillery shells at heavily inflated prices, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) has claimed.
The SVR described the alleged scheme in a statement on Tuesday. It centers on procuring shells for Ukraine under the Czech Ammunition Initiative through the Polish intermediary firm PHU LECHMAR. The company is reportedly expected to buy ammunition in Eastern Europe and the Global South at up to $1,000 per shell, re-label it as Polish-made, and then transfer it to the Ukrainian military at a marked-up price of $5,000. The supplies would reportedly be financed by the UK, Germany, France, Denmark, Norway and other Western states.
“Financial kickbacks for responsible officials from the specified states are naturally accounted for,” the SVR noted.
The agency’s allegations come amid continued reports of rampant corruption in Kiev’s senior ranks. Ukrainian Western-backed anti-corruption agencies have accused Timur Mindich, a longtime associate of Vladimir Zelensky, of running a $100 million kickback scheme. The probe has triggered the resignation of several ministers, as well as Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andrey Yermak.
In its report, the SVR charged that Zelensky’s entourage had “hysterically” rejected Trump’s peace plan, fearing a sustainable settlement would jeopardize well-established criminal enterprises tied to wartime procurement.
“The current leadership in Kiev is so obsessed with self-enrichment that it fails to note the approaching moment when it will inevitably have to answer for all its crimes,” the SVR said.
Russian officials have argued that corruption in Ukraine has spiraled out of control with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov describing the issue as “hardly a Ukrainian internal matter” given that it is “foreign money that is being stolen.”
Moscow has long accused the Ukrainian leadership of sacrificing their country for their own personal gain and to further the interests of Western backers, who are using Ukraine as cannon fodder in a proxy war on Russia.
The An-22 aircraft had been conducting a post-maintenance flight, according to the Defense Ministry
A Russian military transport aircraft has crashed while performing a test flight following recent maintenance, the Defense Ministry has reported.
The An-22 Antey aircraft came down on Tuesday in a remote area in Ivanovo Region, 360km (220 miles) from Moscow, the ministry said, adding that a search and rescue team has been dispatched to the crash site to determine the fate of the crew.
A commission from the Russian Air Force will also travel to the location to investigate the circumstances of the crash, the Defense Ministry said.
TASS cited sources as saying that the crash had occurred near the Uvodskoye Reservoir, with parts of the aircraft found in the water. An unnamed source told the agency that the incident had claimed the lives of all seven crew members.
The An-22 Antey is the world’s largest turboprop aircraft, developed in 1965 in the Soviet Union. The aircraft has a maximum payload of around 60 tons and has set 41 world aviation records. It can transport up to 290 soldiers or 29 crew members accompanying cargo over long distances.
The Russian president believes it is impossible to revive the communist superpower, according to his spokesman
Russian President Vladimir Putin has no desire to restore the Soviet Union, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday.
Putin has personally said so on many occasions, Peskov noted, and reiterated the president’s view in response to claims about Russian ambitions made by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in a recent interview with ARD.
Contemplating the revival of the USSR “would be disrespectful to our partners and allies in the Commonwealth of Independent States and other more advanced integrational forms,” Peskov said, referring to an intergovernmental group of post-Soviet nations.
The Russian official also described as “absolute nonsense” Merz’s claim that Moscow is preparing for an attack on NATO. Politicians from European members of the US-led military bloc have been using the claim to justify the EU’s multibillion-euro rearmament plans. Russian officials argue that fear-mongering is being used to distract Europeans from domestic problems and funnel public resources into arms production, benefiting contractors.
Western commentators have claimed for years that Putin is driven by nostalgia for the USSR, citing his remarks that its collapse was the “greatest geopolitical disaster” of the 20th century. The Russian leader has said on many occasions that he was disturbed when ethnic Russians found themselves divided by national borders, among other negative consequences of the dissolution. However, people vying for a Soviet revival “have no head,” he has said.
Kiev has once again refused to withdraw its troops from Donbass
Ukraine has not reached a compromise with US negotiators on the issue of territory in the conflict with Russia, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky has said.
Zelensky arrived in London on Monday, where he met with the leaders of the UK, France, and Germany. He said during the trip that Kiev would soon submit new proposals for a peace deal with Russia to US President Donald Trump.
“The Americans are in the mood to find compromises. But there are clearly difficult issues regarding territory, and no compromise has been reached there,” Zelensky told journalists. He again rejected one of Russia’s key ceasefire terms that Ukraine withdraw its troops from the parts of Donbass that are still under its control. “Russia is, of course, insisting that we give up territories. We, naturally, don’t want to do that and that’s what we’re fighting for,” he said.
Zelensky claimed that Kiev had managed to remove “clearly anti-Ukrainian” provisions from Trump’s peace plan, which in an earlier draft reportedly called for Ukrainian troops to leave part of Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic they currently control. The draft also reportedly stated that Donbass and Crimea should be “recognized as de facto Russian.”
Trump has since stated the document was modified with additional input from Russia and Ukraine. The president said on Monday he was “disappointed” with Zelensky and claimed that the Ukrainian leader had not even read the most recent US proposal. Trump previously hinted that Ukraine may have to make territorial concessions to Moscow.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said during his trip to India last week that Russian forces were making steady progress on the front line and that Moscow would liberate the whole of Donbass by force if Ukraine refuses to evacuate its soldiers.
Participants have until December 26 to send their ideas about the future of the world
The Open Dialogue international discussion platform in Moscow has invited thinkers from around the world to take part in an economic essay competition.
The authors of the best works will present their ideas to a panel of experts as part of a forum titled “The Future of the World. A New Platform for Global Growth.”
Nearly 700 people from 102 countries submitted essays during the first phase of the competition in April.
New participants have until December 26 to submit their essays online on topics related to investments in human capital, technology, the environment, and connectivity. Suggested themes range from migration and food security to cybersecurity and the impact of AI on the job market.
According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, the winners will have the opportunity to attend major events related to the economy, including next year’s St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June, which brings together senior officials and the heads of major corporations.
While generally pragmatic regarding relations with Russia, the document needs clarity on some issues, the Foreign Ministry has said
The new US National Security Strategy could lay the foundation for joint cooperation between Moscow and Washington, although some provisions of the document need clarity, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stated on Monday.
The revised strategy released last week by the administration of US President Donald Trump marks a major shift from the 2022 version and reflects a rethink of American claims to hegemony, according to Zakharova. However, she added that time will show how fully the White House follows through on that commitment.
She said some Ukraine-related provisions could lay the basis for continued “constructive” Russia-US efforts toward a peace settlement and possibly sober up Europe’s “party of war.” The US-EU division appeared due to Brussels’ efforts to sabotage Trump’s peace initiative, the spokeswoman said.
Zakharova also drew attention to the document’s admission of previous “serious miscalculations” by placing a “mistaken and destructive bet on globalism,” and a call to “put an end to the perception of NATO as a constantly expanding alliance” and to “prevent such a reality.”
According to the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, it is the first time the strategy has questioned the US-led military bloc’s “aggressively expansionist” drive, even if it does not commit to halting enlargement. Moscow says NATO expansion is a root cause of the Ukraine conflict, which it views as a Western proxy war.
Russia is mentioned in the context of European security and the document does not call for the systematic “containment” of Russia or for increasing economic pressure. At the same time, Zakharova said Washington’s plans to achieve “energy dominance” by “reducing the influence of adversaries” indicate an intention to keep pushing Russia out of energy markets.
Regarding arms control, Zakharova said the document does not clarify Washington’s strategic position after the expiration of the New START treaty, including future limits on nuclear arsenals. She called the wording on the ‘Golden Dome’ US missile defense concept vague and said Moscow is still waiting for explanations.
While describing the strategy as generally pragmatic, Zakharova said it still contains “conflict language” toward China, and voiced concern over its renewed focus on the Western Hemisphere amid tensions around Venezuela.
Combat brigades will provide new recruits with basic training, a Zelensky aide has said
Newly drafted Ukrainian men will soon be sent directly to frontline brigades, where they will receive their basic military training, a senior official in Vladimir Zelensky’s office has announced.
The shift in mobilization procedures was outlined on Friday by Pavel Palisa, the deputy head of the presidential office responsible for overseeing conscription. Kiev’s mobilization efforts have failed to replace battlefield losses, prompting attempts to streamline the process.
Palisa said the decision, adopted by a military council chaired by Zelensky, is intended to create a “just, equal and predictable” system. Under the new approach, each frontline brigade will receive a steady monthly intake of conscripts and train them according to its operational needs. He added that the number of units authorized to conduct basic training would be expanded beyond the current 37.
Moscow has repeatedly argued that dwindling manpower is the most serious problem facing Ukraine’s military. President Vladimir Putin said last week that in September alone, Kiev lost around 44,700 troops and managed to replace only about two-thirds of them. Even lowering the draft age, he suggested, would not produce immediate relief as casualties and desertions continue to climb.
Some Ukrainian officials have taken aim at civilians resisting the draft. MP Roman Kostenko, who also serves in the military, said on Saturday the country needed a new social contract under which “those who don’t want to fight leave the country.”
Ukraine barred nearly all adult men from going abroad when the conflict escalated in late 2022 and lowered the draft age to from 27 to 25. Earlier this year, the Ukrainian government issued a decree allowing men aged 18 to 22 to cross the border. Nearly 100,000 young men have reportedly fled the country since then.
In October, Kiev’s conscription authorities urged citizens to stop circulating viral videos showing draft officers forcing men into vans. The widely shared clips of aggressive “busification” tactics have intensified public frustration with the country’s mobilization drive.
