Ukraine war briefing: Putin aiming to ‘manipulate’ Trump, Zelenskyy warns

Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has warned that his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, is aiming to “manipulate” Donald Trump, after Putin praised the US leader and said he was ready for talks with him. “He wants to manipulate the desire of the president of the United States of America to achieve peace,” Zelenskyy said during his daily evening address on Friday. He said Putin was ready to continue the war and “manipulate the leaders of the world”.

Putin has said he is ‘ready for negotiations” on the war in Ukraine with Donald Trump and suggested it would be a good idea for them to meet. The Russian president struck a favourable tone towards his US counterpart, describing his relationship with Trump as “businesslike, pragmatic and trustworthy”. Putin echoed the US president’s claim that he would have prevented the war starting in Ukraine in 2022, and parroted Trump’s debunked assertion that the 2020 US elections were “stolen” from him.

The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has ordered a halt to virtually all US foreign aid, but made an exception for funding to Israel and Egypt, according to an internal memo to staff at the US state department. The sweeping order appears to affect everything from development assistance to military aid – including potentially to Ukraine, which received billions of dollars in weapons under Donald Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, as it tries to repel a Russian invasion. The scope of the order was not immediately known and it was unclear what funding could be cut given that the US Congress sets the federal government budget.

North Korea is preparing to send more soldiers to fight in Ukraine, military officials in South Korea have said, despite reports of heavy casualties among troops from the communist state. South Korea’s joint chiefs of staff said in a statement on Friday that four months after the North sent an estimated 11,000 troops to the Ukraine conflict – a significant number of whom have been killed or wounded – the regime “is suspected of accelerating follow-up measures and preparation for an additional dispatch of troops”.

Russian aerial attacks near Kyiv killed three people and wounded several others, Ukrainian officials said on Friday. “Three people were killed in an enemy attack in the Kyiv region,” the emergency services said in a statement on social media. Fragments of a drone had struck a 10-storey residential building after the head of the region said a private home had also been hit, it added.

An overnight Ukrainian attack involving more than 121 drones had targeted 13 Russian regions, Russia’s defence ministry said on Friday, but they were repelled. Ukraine’s military said the attack hit a Russian oil refinery and a microchip factory in the Bryansk region with a video posted online showing a giant plume of smoke and flames engulfing an oil refinery in the Ryazan region.

Tens of thousands of protesters flocked to a central square in the Slovakian capital Bratislava on Friday, waving banners opposing prime minister Robert Fico’s policy shift closer to Russia. Opposition parties last week said they were initiating a no-confidence vote against Fico’s government, but the prime minister has looked set to survive the vote. The latest round of protests come after Fico privately travelled to Moscow in December to meet Vladimir Putin, a rare encounter for an EU leader since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Sales of US military equipment to foreign governments in 2024 rose by 29% to a record $318.7bn as countries sought to replenish stocks sent to Ukraine and prepare for major conflicts, the US state department said on Friday. Sales approved in the year included $23bn worth of F-16 fighter jets to Turkey, $18.8bn worth of F-15 fighter jets to Israel and $2.5bn worth of M1A2 Abrams tanks to Romania.