Firefighters battle warehouse blaze after Ukraine drone attack in Russia

Russian firefighters are battling a large fire in a warehouse in Novokuibyshevsk in Russia’s Samara region, Ukraine authorities and media said on Monday.

“There are no injuries,” the emergency ministry said on the Telegram channel, citing preliminary details. The RIA news agency said a warehouse was on fire.

It also cited the region’s governor as saying Ukraine launched an overnight drone attack targeting enterprises in the region.

Ukraine says Russian forces depleted and stalling on eastern sector

Ukrainian forces are winning small patches of land and managed to stall the Russian offensive on the eastern sector of its frontline, its soldiers and military analysts have said.

The situation has improved as Ukraine is able to find innovative ways to compensate for its shortage of troops, Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, told The New York Times.

He explained that Putin’s troops and their offensive effort in Donetsk have been stalled in recent months due to “poor weather, exhaustion among Russian forces, and effective Ukrainian adaptation to the way Russian troops have been fighting”.

Russia claims it has recaptured three more settlements in Kursk

Russian forces recaptured three more settlements in Russia’s western Kursk region, the defence ministry said, part of an operation to evict Ukrainian troops holding chunks of territory seven months after a cross-border incursion.

The ministry statement, posted on the Telegram app, followed reports by Russian bloggers that Russian special forces had crept for miles through a gas pipeline near the town of Sudzha in an attempt to surprise Ukrainian forces.

The three settlements now under Russian control according to the ministry – Malaya Lokhnya, Cherkasskoye Porechnoye and Kositsa — all lie north of Sudzha.

“The Russian Federation’s armed forces are continuing to rout groups of the Ukrainian army on the territory of Kursk region,” the statement said.

Ukraine has not confirmed the loss of territory in its daily update.

A statement from Ukraine’s airborne assault forces said that Russian soldiers had used the pipeline in an attempt to gain a foothold, but the Russians were promptly detected and attacked with rockets, artillery and drones.

The Ukrainian military’s General Staff in a late afternoon report said its forces repelled 15 Russian attacks in Kursk region, with six armed clashes still ongoing. It also reported 12 Russian air strikes on their positions.

One issue to be addressed in Jeddah is the fate of a minerals deal between the US and Ukraine, with Kyiv wanting to include a US security guarantee in exchange for access to certain mineral resources in Ukraine.

Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump had been slated to sign that accord during Mr Zelensky’s Washington visit. But after the White House blowup between the two men, it was not signed.

Since then, both sides have expressed a renewed willingness to sign the deal, but no signing has yet occurred. Mr Trump yesterday said he thought Ukraine would sign it, with a caveat that he wanted Mr Zelensky’s government to show that it wanted peace.

“They will sign the minerals deal but I want them to want peace… They haven’t shown it to extent they should,” he said.

A delegation of Ukrainian and American officials are meeting in Saudi Arabia today to discuss how to bring an end to the war with Russia.

American officials will use the talks to decide whether Kyiv is interested in a “realistic” peace deal, one of them told Reuters, as well as repairing the damage to relations with the US after Donald Trump’s Oval Office clash with Volodymyr Zelensky.

The US will be represented by secretary of state Marco Rubio, national security adviser Mike Waltz and Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff.

“You can’t say ‘I want peace,’ and, ‘I refuse to compromise on anything,'” one of the US officials said of the upcoming talks.

“We want to see if the Ukrainians are interested not just in peace, but in a realistic peace,” said the other official. “If they are only interested in 2014 or 2022 borders, that tells you something.”

The Ukrainian officials will be led by Andriy Yermak, Mr Zelensky’s chief of staff.

In his nightly video address yesterday, Mr Zelensky said will travel to Saudi Arabia today to “continue to work for the sake of peace”.