"We have a plan B and a plan C. But our focus is plan A, the essence of which is to get everyone's support" for Ukraine's accession, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said.
"(T)he presence at the Victory Parade of a country that bombs cities, hospitals, and daycares, and which has caused the deaths and injuries of over a million people over three years, is a shame," Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said.
"According to the participants of the performances, their goal is to remind the civilized world of the barbaric actions of Moscow, which for many years and decades has systematically violated international law," a source in Ukraine’s military intelligence agency (HUR) told the Kyiv Independent.
"I have great hope that an agreement for a ceasefire in Ukraine will be reached this weekend," German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on May 9, shortly before traveling to Kyiv alongside the leaders of France, Poland, and the U.K.
U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk will arrive in Kyiv early on May 10.
The United States embassy in Kyiv on May 9 issued a warning that Russia could launch "a potentially significant" attack in the coming days, despite Putin's self-declared Victory Day "truce."
The sanctioned oil tankers have transported over $24 billion in cargo since 2024, according to Downing Street. The U.K. has now sanctioned more shadow fleet vessels than any other country.
Washington and its partners are considering additional sanctions if the parties do not observe a ceasefire, with political and technical negotiations between Europe and the U.S. intensifying since last week, Reuters' source said.
President Volodymyr Zelensky talks during a press conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Dec. 1, 2024. (Yan Dobronosov/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images)
Russian President Vladimir Putin does not love his country and people as he is sending Russia's youth to die in his wars of aggression, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview with U.S. podcaster Lex Fridman released on Jan. 5.
"He does not love his people. He loves only his inner circle," Zelensky said in response to Fridman's suggestion that Putin is a "serious person who loves his country."
"What is his country? He happened to consider Ukraine his country," the president responded in the three-hour-long interview, pointing out that Putin had previously also launched a destructive war against Chechnya, now a constituent republic of the Russian Federation.
Putin rose to power during the Second Chechen War in 1999-2000, in which Russia forcibly subjugated the region and seized its capital, Grozny, after a devastating siege.
"Who are the Chechens? A different people: Another faith… Another language. One million people eliminated…. How did he kill them – with love?" Zelensky asked rhetorically.
Ukraine's head of state also stressed that Russia's all-out war against Ukraine resulted in 780,000 of its soldiers killed or wounded, adding that Putin "calls them all Russians, even those who don't know how to speak Russian, on his territory of Russia, everything they've enslaved."
"He's (Putin) sending 18-year-boys (to die in war)... It's not that the fascists came to his country, and he needs to defend it. He came to ours, and he sends them," Zelensky continued, providing other examples of Moscow's wars and military interventions in Syria, Chechnya, Georgia, and Africa.
Though the exact Russian losses in the full-scale invasion are difficult to establish with certainty, The Economist wrote that they already outpace Moscow's battlefield losses in all of its post-1945 wars combined.
Martin Fornusek is a news editor at the Kyiv Independent. He has previously worked as a news content editor at the media company Newsmatics and is a contributor to Euromaidan Press. He was also volunteering as an editor and translator at the Czech-language version of Ukraïner. Martin studied at Masaryk University in Brno, Czechia, holding a bachelor's degree in security studies and history and a master's degree in conflict and democracy studies.
Kateryna Denisova
