Sea Baby naval drones had disabled vessels capable of transporting oil worth almost $70 million

The conflict is neither a clearcut defeat nor a feelgood victory, but an in-between outcome that contains profound elements of each

No one should be satisfied with the unjust peace that Ukraine may be forced to accept. The aggressor would be rewarded with territory and other concessions from the victim it has brutalized. Yet the horrified reaction in Washington to recent peace proposals is troubling in its own right.

The Trump administration’s recent 28-point plan, roundly denounced in Congress and the commentariat as a “capitulation” to Moscow, actually offered Kyiv a remarkable strategic outcome. Under its terms, Ukraine would face no meaningful limit on its peacetime military, despite Russian attempts to impose draconian restrictions since 2022. (The only requirement, a cap of 600,000 personnel, probably exceeds the number of active-duty forces Ukraine would maintain anyway.) Moreover, Ukraine would receive a substantial security guarantee from the United States and Europe – the strongest in history, even if short of a Nato-style commitment.

Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School

Ukraine has claimed to have hit Putin’s “shadow fleet” oil tankers as it seeks to step up pressure on Russia's oil industry

Mayor Vitali Klitschko reported that 15 people were wounded

Longtemps passé sous les radars des régulateurs grâce à une base d'utilisateurs jugée inférieure aux exigences européennes, Apple Plans vient de franchir le cap fatidique des 45 millions d'utilisateurs. Apple a notifié Bruxelles qu'elle dépassait désormais les seuils du DMA, ce qui la force à ouvrir son système.

Zelensky’s chief of staff has been integral to peace talks with the US

Oscar-winner Mstyslav Chernov expresses scepticism that Vladimir Putin will accept peace terms as US support for Ukraine wavers

Fiona Hill, a Russian expert and former White House adviser, who witnessed meetings between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, tells The Independent podcast World of Trouble’s Sam Kiley that the Russian president knows how to mesmerise his US counterpart, and has no plan to give up his designs on Ukraine

Zelensky’s lost his chief of staff amid a €100m corruption scandal that the Kremlin will exploit – this is a disaster to Kyiv but also a sign that its system works, writes world affairs editor Sam Kiley

US envoy Steve Witkoff will travel to Russia next week for the next stage of peace talks

Washington’s Putin-appeasing plan for peace in Ukraine has failed, but many heard death knell sounded for European reliance on US protection

Kaja Kallas, the European Union foreign policy chief, asked her officials this week to dig up the number of times Russia had – in its various guises – invaded other states in the 20th and 21st centuries. The answer that came back was 19 states, on 33 occasions. Kallas, the former Estonian prime minister, was not just indulging in some form of historical mathematics. She was seeking to make a point that lies at the heart of the dispute between the US and Europe over Ukraine’s future, a dispute that has again revealed the chasm across the Atlantic about the true nature of the Russian regime.

Kallas reads history books as a leisure activity and – drawing on her own country’s history of Soviet occupation – has long maintained that the Soviet Union fell, but its imperialism never did. “Russia has never truly had to come to terms with its brutal past or bear the consequences of its actions,” she has said, arguing that the nature of the Russian regime means “rewarding aggression will bring more war, not less”: Putin will come back for more.