Here is how things stand on Tuesday, August 19:
Contents
Politics and diplomacy
- United States President Donald Trump said he had a “good meeting” with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders at the White House on Monday.
- Trump said the leaders discussed security guarantees that would be provided to Ukraine by European countries in “coordination with” the US.
- Zelenskyy said US involvement in the security guarantees was “a major step forward”, and that details would be “formalised on paper within the next week to 10 days”.
- Zelenskyy also told reporters that his country had offered to buy $90bn worth of US weapons.
- Finland’s President Alexander Stubb said the security guarantees discussed were similar to the Article 5-type guarantees offered to NATO members, but that details still needed to be ironed out.
- A Kremlin aide said Trump spoke with Putin on the phone for 40 minutes after his meeting with Zelenskyy and the European leaders, and that the two leaders discussed the possibility of increasing the level of Russian and Ukrainian representatives during talks.
- Trump said he had begun making arrangements for a bilateral summit between the Russian leader and Zelenskyy, with trilateral talks involving the US president to follow.
- German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said a meeting between Putin and Zelenskyy could take place within two weeks.
- French President Emmanuel Macron said Trump believes Putin “also wants a peace accord” but that if the “process is met by refusal, we are also ready to say that we need to increase sanctions [on Russia]”.
- British Prime Minister Keir Starmer told the BBC that the talks led to a “significant breakthrough” because “we are now going to be working with the US on those security guarantees.”
Fighting
- Ukrainian authorities said Russian attacks before the talks killed 14 people across the country. This includes a drone attack on an apartment building in Kharkiv that killed at least seven people. Thirty others were wounded.
- The victims on Monday also included three people who were killed in a ballistic missile strike on the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia, the regional governor said, adding that another 23 were wounded.
- Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched a total of four Iskander-M ballistic missiles and 140 Shahed and decoy drones across Ukraine overnight, of which 88 drones were shot down or jammed.
- In Russia, falling debris from a Ukrainian drone shot down by Russian forces set off fires in a hospital building and on the grounds of an oil refinery, south of the city of Volgograd, regional governor Andrei Bocharov said in a post on Telegram.
- Russian forces destroyed 141 Ukrainian drones and four guided aerial bombs in a 24-hour period, Russia’s state-run news agency TASS reported on Monday, citing Russia’s Defence Ministry.
