Ukraine-Russia war latest: Zelensky strikes minerals deal with Trump to secure US support

Ukraine launched an overnight drone attack on Russia’s southern Krasnodar region, damaging several houses including in the Black Sea port of Tuapse, Russian officials said.

Three residential houses were damaged throughout the region, but there were no immediate reports of injuries, governor Veniamin Kondratyev said in a post on Telegram

.A house in Tuapse caught fire but that has since been extinguished, Sergei Boiko, head of the Tuapse municipality, said.

Russia’s SHOT news Telegram channel reported that Ukrainian drones appeared to be aimed at the port area and that residents heard about 40 explosions in what they said sounded like air defence systems in operation.

The top Republican in the U.S. Senate broke with the Trump administration on the question of who started the war in Ukraine.

On Monday, the United States voted against a resolution backed by 93 nations that condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. In doing so, the U.S. found itself on the same side as Russia, North Korea and Belarus. Previously, Donald Trump has said Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is responsible for starting the war.

But Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters he was not sure why the U.S. voted the way it did at the United Nations.

Europe should move from freezing Russian assets to seizing them, British foreign minister David Lammy said, hardening Britain’s position on how the West should use bonds and other securities frozen since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

After Russian president Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine in 2022, the US and its allies prohibited transactions with Russia’s central bank and finance ministry, blocking $300-$350bn of sovereign Russian assets.

European leaders want to use those assets to help rebuild Ukraine, but have yet to reach an agreement on how to avoid legal challenges or setting a problematic international precedent, with several options under consideration.

“Europe has to act quickly, and I believe we should move from freezing assets to seizing assets,” Mr Lammy told parliament when asked if he would support emergency legislation to seize and repurpose the assets to support Ukraine.”It’s not an issue on which any government can act alone. We must act with European allies.”

Authorities in Russia have detained Ukrainian film critic Ekaterina Barabash in Moscow, according to her family and local reports.

Ms Barabash is the daughter of late Ukrainian literary scholar and Shevchenko Prize laureate Yuriy Barabash, Kyiv Independent reported.

It appears she was detained because of her work in the Russian publication, Republic, which was added to the foreign agent media register and banned in 2022, shortly after Moscow invaded Ukraine.

Moscow is working on bringing 16 children to Russia from Ukraine and plans to reunite 10 children with relatives in Ukraine, Russia’s presidential commissioner for children’s rights told RIA agency.

“We have a clear presidential mandate that we work only with full-fledged legal representatives, that is, relatives, parents who have legal force and can take care of their children,” commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova said.

She said that through those channels, at the moment 95 children have been reunited with their relatives in Ukraine, and 17 children have returned to Russia.

Moscow and Kyiv have carried out several exchanges of children for reunification with their families since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Editorial: In voting to reject a United Nation resolution condemning Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine – alongside three undemocratic regimes – Donald Trump’s desire to be a global renegade is clear. It a turning point that must be faced up to, in all its enormity