Foreign
Trump urges Russia to ‘get moving’ on Ukraine as Witkoff meets Putin
US envoy Steve Witkoff wrapped up his latest talks with Russia’s Vladimir Putin on Friday, after President Donald Trump urged his Russian counterpart to move quicker to end what he said was the country’s “senseless war” with Ukraine.
Trump has been pressing Moscow and Kyiv to agree on a ceasefire deal but has failed to extract any major concessions from the Kremlin, despite repeated negotiations between Russian and US officials.
The US leader told NBC News last month he was “pissed off” with his Russian counterpart, while top US diplomat Marco Rubio warned last week that Washington would not tolerate “endless negotiations” with Russia over the conflict.
“Russia has to get moving,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, adding that the conflict, which began in February 2022 when Moscow sent troops into Ukraine, was “senseless” and “should have never happened”.
Kyiv and several of its Western allies suspect Russia of stalling the talks on purpose.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Russia of dragging Beijing into the conflict and on Friday claimed that hundreds of Chinese nationals were fighting at the Ukraine front line alongside Russian troops.
Trump’s post came just before Witkoff’s meeting with Putin at the presidential library in Saint Petersburg, which state news agencies said lasted four and a half hours.
The Kremlin said afterwards only that the meeting had taken place and “focused on various aspects of the Ukrainian settlement”, without elaborating.
Spokesman Dmitry Peskov had said earlier that he expected no diplomatic “breakthroughs” from the talks — Witkoff’s third with Putin since February.
He also said “maybe” to a question about whether a possible meeting between Putin and Trump would be discussed.
– Kellogg’s ‘zones of responsibility’ –
After their last meeting, Witkoff — a long-time Trump ally who worked with the US president in real estate — said Putin was a “great leader” and “not a bad guy”.
The envoy’s praise of a president long seen by the United States as an autocratic adversary highlights the dramatic turn in Washington’s approach to dealings with the Kremlin since Trump took office for a second term.
Despite a flurry of diplomacy, there has been little meaningful progress on Trump’s main aim of achieving a ceasefire.
Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, suggested British and French troops could adopt zones of control in the country, in an interview with The Times published Saturday.
Kellogg suggested they could have areas of responsibility west of the Dnipro river, as part of a “reassurance force”, with a demilitarised zone separating them from Russian-occupied areas in the east.
“You could almost make it look like what happened with Berlin after World War II,” he told the British newspaper.
“I was speaking of a post-ceasefire resiliency force in support of Ukraine’s sovereignty. In discussions of partitioning, I was referencing areas or zones of responsibility for an allied force (without US troops),” he said later on X.
– ‘Using Chinese lives’ –
Kyiv said this week that its forces had captured two Chinese nationals in the eastern Donetsk region fighting for Moscow.
The Kremlin denied the claim, while Beijing warned parties to the conflict against making “irresponsible remarks”.
“As of now, we have information that at least several hundred Chinese nationals are fighting as part of Russia’s occupation forces,” Zelensky told military chiefs from allied countries in Brussels.
“This means Russia is clearly trying to prolong the war — even by using Chinese lives.”
The Ukrainian leader also called out Russia for having refused a complete ceasefire proposed by the United States with Ukrainian approval a month ago.
Putin last month rejected a full and unconditional pause in the conflict, while the Kremlin has made a truce in the Black Sea conditional on the West lifting certain sanctions.
– Question of trust –
Trump has pushed for a broad rapprochement with Moscow, which has yielded some results.
On Thursday, Russia freed dual US-Russian ballet dancer Ksenia Karelina from prison in exchange for suspected tech smuggler Arthur Petrov, the second exchange between Moscow and Washington in less than two months.
Karelina, arrested last January while visiting Russia to see family, was serving a 12-year sentence on “treason” charges after she donated the equivalent of around $50 to a pro-Ukraine charity.
The head of Moscow’s foreign intelligence service, Sergei Naryshkin, said Friday that Russia would discuss more prisoner swaps in the future.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the swaps helped build confidence between the two sides, which deteriorated under former US president Joe Biden’s administration.
“It helps build trust, which is much needed, but it will take a long time to finally restore it,” he told reporters.
AFP
Foreign ministers of military-ruled Sahel states of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger said on Monday they endorse an initiative offering them access to global trade through Morocco’s Atlantic ports, Reuters reported.
The foreign ministers expressed their countries’ position during a meeting with Morocco’s King Mohammed VI in Rabat, it said.
The West African nations, run by military leaders who took power in coups in recent years, withdrew from the regional grouping ECOWAS last year and formed an alliance known as the Confederation of Sahel States (AES).
Morocco, a major investor in West Africa’s financial and agricultural sectors, announced its trade access initiative in November 2023, after ECOWAS imposed trade restrictions on the three states.
The initiative is conducive to “diversifying our access to the sea,” Mali’s foreign minister Abdoulaye Diop told state media.
The meeting “is part of the strong and longstanding relations of the Kingdom with the three brotherly countries of the Alliance of Sahel States,” Morocco’s news agency said.
The visit takes place as relations between the AES and Algeria, Morocco’s regional rival, deteriorate.
Algeria has cut ties with Morocco and backs the Polisario Front which seeks an independent state in Western Sahara, a territory Morocco considers its own and where it is building a port worth $1 billion.
The new AES grouping expelled French and other Western forces and turned towards Russia for military support.
In December, Morocco mediated the release of four French spies held in Burkina Faso, five months after Paris recognised Rabat’s sovereignty over Western Sahara.
A massive power outage paralyzed Spain and Portugal on Monday in an incident with no immediate explanation.
“It’s best to not speculate. We will know the causes soon. We are not discarding any hypothesis, but right now, we just focus on what’s most important: returning electricity to our homes,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said at a news conference Monday.
The stoppage, which occurred about 12:30 p.m. Madrid time, caused chaos across the Iberian Peninsula and showed the vulnerability of Europe’s electrical grid — even on days without extreme weather or spiking demand.
Trains stopped running. Hospitals canceled surgeries, according to news agencies, and depended on backup generators. Business ground to a halt as machines were unable to process credit card transactions. The outage even suspended several Madrid Open tennis matches, with photos showing a court with nonfunctioning scoreboards and darkened stands. Sánchez urged citizens to restrict cellphone use and to call emergency dispatchers only “when it is really necessary.”
By about 5:30 p.m. Madrid time, Red Eléctrica, the corporation that operates Spain’s electricity grid, said some power had been restored across corners of the peninsula, including parts of Catalonia, the Basque Country and Andalusia. About two hours later, the utility provider said more than a fifth of the peninsula’s power had been recovered. Full recovery may take up to 10 hours, Red Eléctrica told Spanish news outlets, which means the country’s power could be restored some time late Monday.
“Causes are being analyzed, and all resources are being dedicated to addressing the issue,” Red Eléctrica said in a statement.
More than 50 million people live on the Iberian Peninsula, but authorities did not provide an immediate estimate for the number of people affected by the outage. Portugal’s national grid operator described it as a “massive cut” in electricity supply across the peninsula. Data from Red Eléctrica showed a sudden plunge in electricity demand from about 27,000 megawatts to less than 13,000. Levels remained abnormally low two hours later.
Spain’s Energy Ministry said in a statement that Sara Aagesen, a deputy prime minister, visited the Red Eléctrica control center to “learn about the situation firsthand and monitor the incident.”
“All necessary measures will be put in place to restore normality as quickly as possible,” the statement said.
Prime Minister Sánchez also held a meeting at the control center, with Aagesen and several other ministers present, the Spanish newspaper El País reported, and Spain’s National Security Council called a meeting to address the outage.
Portugal’s Lusa News Agency said the country’s cybersecurity center had seen no evidence so far that the blackout stemmed from a cyberattack. Separately, the Reuters news agency quoted unnamed officials as saying a cyberattack had not been ruled out.
The Spanish grid also connects with Morocco, France, Andorra and Portugal. Spain and France experienced a major blackout on July 24, 2021, but it lasted less than an hour.
Previous power outages in Europe have been caused by technical problems, lightning strikes and damaged cables. In 2003, Italy faced a huge blackout because a tree was too close to a power line, resulting in a flashover, or a jump of electricity from the line to vegetation.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has announced a temporary ceasefire for the war in Ukraine.
The Kremlin said the ceasefire would run from the morning of 8 May until 11 May – which coincides with victory celebrations to mark the end of World War Two.
In response, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha called for an immediate ceasefire lasting “at least 30 days”.
While US President Donald Trump, who has been attempting to broker a truce between the two sides, said he wants to see a permanent ceasefire, the White House said.
The Kremlin announced a similar, 30-hour truce over Easter, but while both sides reported a dip in fighting, they accused each other of hundreds of violations.
Ceasefires have been attempted more than 20 times in Ukraine – all of them failed eventually, and some within minutes of going into effect.
The most recent one, over Easter, was very limited in scope and only resulted in a slight reduction in fighting, with both sides accusing each other of violating the truce.
In a statement on Monday, the Kremlin said Putin declared the ceasefire “based on humanitarian considerations”.
A translation of the statement said: “Russia believes that the Ukrainian side should follow this example.
“In the event of violations of the ceasefire by the Ukrainian side, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation will give an adequate and effective response.
“The Russian side once again declares its readiness for peace talks without preconditions, aimed at eliminating the root causes of the Ukrainian crisis, and constructive interaction with international partners.”
Following its release, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Sybiha said: “If Russia truly wants peace, it must cease fire immediately.”
“Why wait until May 8th?” he wrote on X. “If the fire can be ceased now and since any date for 30 days—so it is real, not just for a parade.”
He said Ukraine is ready to support a “lasting, durable, and full ceasefire. And this is what we are constantly proposing, for at least 30 days”.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump was growing “frustrated with leaders of both countries”.
“He wants to see a permanent ceasefire.
“I understand Vladimir Putin this morning offered a temporary ceasefire. The president has made it clear he wants to see a permanent ceasefire first to stop the killing, stop the bloodshed.”
The latest announcement comes during what the US has described as a “very critical” week for Russia-Ukraine peace talks.
Washington has been trying to broker a deal between the two sides, but the Donald Trump administration has threatened to pull out if they do not see progress.
Putin is keen to create the impression that Russia is serious about seeking peace – and he is keen for Trump to hear that message given Ukraine has accepted Washington’s proposal for a more lasting 30-day ceasefire.
It comes after the US president expressed annoyance with Russia’s continued attacks on Ukraine.
Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, and currently controls about 20% Ukraine’s territory, including the southern Crimea peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014.
It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of people – the vast majority of them soldiers – have been killed or injured on all sides since 2022.
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