Ukraine-Russia war live: Zelensky blocks drone sales as he waits for Trump to resume peace talks with Putin

An oil depot in Russia’s southern ⁠Krasnodar region caught fire after a drone ⁠attack, local ​authorities ⁠reported this morning.

There ⁠were no injuries ​at ⁠the depot ‌in the town of ‌Labinsk, the authorities said. The ‌region is regularly ⁠the target for Ukrainian drone attacks.

“Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” which takes on the Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s propaganda and patriotism program for the nation’s youth after its invasion of Ukraine, has won the Oscar for best documentary feature.

“In the name of our future, in the name of all of our children, stop all of these wars now,” the film’s protagonist and co-director Pavel Talankin said in Russian from the stage through a translator.

Talankin was a teacher and activities director in a small-town school in Russia who captured his students’ lessons, chants and songs promoting the war in Ukraine on video. He smuggled his hard drives out of the country to collaborate with American director David Borenstein, who lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The two men gave the night some of its most overtly political moments during their speeches. Borenstein spoke broadly about nations tipping into totalitarianism, while clearly emphasizing similarities between his country and Talankin’s.

“‘Mr. Nobody Against Putin’ is about how you lose your country,” Borenstein said. “You lose it through countless small little acts of complicity,” he said.

Cheers in the auditorium grew as Borenstein said you lose a country when “we don’t say anything” when governments kill people in the streets and oligarchs seek to consolidate control over media outlets.

“We all face a moral choice, but luckily even a nobody is more powerful than you think,” Borenstein said.

The war in Ukraine has loomed large in Oscar documentary categories since it began. The Associated Press’ documentary “20 Days in Mariupol” won best documentary feature in 2024.

This year’s documentary short nominees included “Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud,” about an American journalist killed in the war.

Volodymyr Zelensky has said he is against allowing Russian oil to transit through Ukraine while the EU imposes sanctions on its sale elsewhere amid pressure to reopen the Druzhba pipeline, which until late January transported Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia.

“Why can we, in one case, tell the United States that we oppose lifting sanctions, while on the other hand forcing Ukraine to resume oil transit through Druzhba — and at a political price that effectively pays for anti-European policies?” Zelensky said. The US has temporarily eased some sanctions on Russian oil shipments, reflecting global concerns over sharply higher crude prices due to supply shortages stemming from the Iran war.

Zelensky said if conditions imposed on Ukraine because of the dispute threatened weapons supplies, Kyiv would have no choice but to resume oil transit, but said he told EU partners this would amount to “blackmail”.

Oil deliveries through the Druzhba have been halted since 27 January leading to an escalating feud between Hungary and Ukraine. The Ukrainian government says that a Russian drone strike damaged the pipeline’s infrastructure, but Hungarian prime minister and Kremlin ally Viktor Orban has accused Zelensky of deliberately holding up oil supplies.

In response, Orban vetoed a new round of EU sanctions against Russia, and is blocking a major €90bn (£77bn) EU loan for Ukraine until flows are resumed.

Russia has accused Ukraine of launching a major drone attack on Moscow with more than 100 drones over the weekend, with wave after wave of long-range “kamikaze” drones being shot down by air defences on their way to the city.

Figures reported by Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin this morning indicated more than 100 drones were shot down over two days.

TASS quoted a defence ministry source saying that at least 145 drones had been shot down overnight, including 53 over the Moscow region.

Moscow’s main airports imposed flight restrictions amid the attack, Russia’s aviation watchdog said.

Volodymyr Zelensky has pushed back against US president Donald Trump’s recent assertion that Washington has no need for Ukrainian drone technology.

“No, we don’t need their help on drone defense,” Trump said in a Fox News Radio interview that aired Friday.

Zelensky said Washington had reached out to Ukraine “several times” to request assistance for a particular country or for support for Americans, without giving specifics. He said the requests had come from various US military institutions to Ukraine’s ministry of defence and other military leaders.

“All our institutions received these requests, and we responded to them,” Zelensky said.

He said he had offered Washington a defence cooperation deal last year worth $35bn-$50bn that would have given the US administration access to technology from roughly 200 Ukrainian drone, AI and electronic warfare firms, with half of all production earmarked for partners, primarily the US.

Zelensky said American military officials had expressed strong interest in the proposal, and Trump himself had indicated he was receptive.

“We received a message from them, and directly from the president as well, that they are interested,” Zelensky told reporters. “We did not sign the document with President Trump. I do not have an answer as to why. Perhaps it will happen later, but I am not sure.”

Speaking with Meet the Press anchor Kristen Welker on Saturday, the president knocked Zelensky for offering assistance to the US and Middle Eastern countries, the latter of which the Ukrainian president said on Friday were seeking his aid in sharing drone detection technology.

The “last person we need help from is Zelensky,” Trump told Welker.

The Trump administration has repeatedly declared victory while the US and Israel continue to launch attacks in recent days. Iranian forces, in response, have largely closed off the Strait of Hormuz, choking global shipping traffic.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said he was ready for the next round of trilateral peace talks to end Russia’s more than four-year-old invasion of Ukraine, but that it was up to Washington and Moscow to agree on where and when to meet.

Zelensky said the US had proposed hosting the next meeting between American, Ukrainian and Russian negotiating teams, which include US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, but Moscow had refused to send a delegation.

“We are waiting for a response from the Americans. Either they will change the country where we meet, or the Russians must confirm the US,” Zelensky said in a media briefing on Saturday. “We are not blocking any of these initiatives. We want a trilateral meeting to take place,” he said.

The US has postponed its sponsored talks between the two sides due to the war in the Middle East. The Iran war, which erupted on 28 February following US-Israeli strikes on Iran and spread across the region, has drawn the international spotlight away from Ukraine’s plight as it strives to hold back Russia’s bigger army.

A Swedish court on Sunday ordered the detention of the Russian captain of a ship that was suspected to be sailing under a false flag in the Baltic Sea and was boarded by authorities last week.

The commander of the Sea Owl 1, whose name hasn’t been released, was arrested on Friday — the day after the Swedish coast guard boarded the vessel off Trelleborg, on Sweden’s southern coast.

Prosecutors suspect him of using a false document. They said Sunday that the district court in Ystad ordered him held in custody in line with their request, Swedish news agency TT reported.

The tanker was sailing under the flag of the Comoros, an island nation off East Africa. But the coast guard has said that it suspects it isn’t in the shipping registry there and therefore there is no flag state to vouch for safety on board.

Volodymyr Zelensky has said the treatment from Ukraine’s European allies over the Druzbha oil pipeline is a “blackmail”.

The Ukrainian branch of the Druzhba oil pipeline, which supplies Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia, was severely ⁠damaged by fire after a Russian attack, Ukraine’s energy minister Denys Shmyhal told Interfax Ukraine on Tuesday.

Zelensky said Ukraine is now facing European pressure to allow oil to flow from the pipeline which has been disconnected since an attack in January.

“If we have decided to restore Russian oil supplies, then I want them to know that I am against it. … But if I am given conditions that Ukraine will not receive weapons, then, excuse me, I am powerless on this issue; I told our friends in Europe that this is called blackmail,” Zelensky said in reported remarks.

The European Commission has proposed sending a fact-finding mission to inspect the damage to the Druzhba pipeline in an attempt to resolve the dispute.

Ukraine is waiting for the US and Russian officials to continue the next round of trilateral peace talks, Volodymy Zelensky said.

Zelensky said the US had proposed hosting a meeting but Russia has refused to send a delegation to take the talks forward.

“We are waiting for a response from the Americans,” he said.

This comes at a time the US is reportedly losing interest in brokering an end to the war in Ukraine.

“A pause has indeed appeared in the talks. The Americans have other priorities, and that’s understandable,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told the Financial Times.