"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.
The Kyiv Independent’s contributor Ignatius Ivlev-Yorke spent a day with a mobile team from the State Emergency Service in Nikopol in the south of Ukraine as they responded to relentless drone, artillery, and mortar strikes from Russian forces just across the Dnipro River. Nikopol is located across from the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in the city of Enerhodar.
A sapper defuses an anti-tank mine as a consolidated squad of the Explosives Service of Ukraine carries out demining work in Kharkiv Oblast on Oct. 24, 2023. (Ukrinform/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Pyrotechnic teams from Ukraine's State Emergency Service have detected and disposed of over 533,200 pieces of explosive ordnance since Russia's full-scale invasion began on February 24, 2022.
The teams have cleared around 148,858 hectares of territory, including 4,018 aerial bombs, according to a report published on Oct. 4.
Over the past 24 hours alone, the units of the State Emergency Service responded to 173 calls, removing and disposing of 293 explosives, including two air bombs, while surveying an additional 127,630 hectares.
The regions most frequently requiring pyrotechnic deployment include Kharkiv (35,815 times), Kherson (16,560 times), Donetsk (14,826 times), Kyiv (11,393 times), Mykolaiv (9,360 times), Chernihiv (6,948 times), and Sumy (4,425 times).
Authorities urge the public to report any suspicious objects by calling 101.
Ukraine also remains the world’s most mined country. The country's Defense Ministry specialists have cleared 30,000 square kilometers of mines over the past two years - an area comparable to the size of Belgium or Moldova.
Since 2022, approximately 174,000 square kilometers of Ukrainian land have been contaminated with explosives, making 144,000 square kilometers still potentially dangerous.
Olena Goncharova is the Head of North America desk at The Kyiv Independent, where she has previously worked as a development manager and Canadian correspondent. She first joined the Kyiv Post, Ukraine's oldest English-language newspaper, as a staff writer in January 2012 and became the newspaper’s Canadian correspondent in June 2018. She is based in Edmonton, Alberta. Olena has a master’s degree in publishing and editing from the Institute of Journalism in Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv. Olena was a 2016 Alfred Friendly Press Partners fellow who worked for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for six months. The program is administered by the University of Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia.
Francis Farrell
