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WASHINGTON — Vladimir Putin is feeling the sting of President Trump’s new oil sanctions — so much so that he dispatched one of his top henchmen on a desperate charm offensive across the US. Kirill Dmitriev, the Kremlin-linked financier who once served as Moscow’s backchannel to Washington, spent the weekend trying to schmooze top Trump officials and going on a media blitz. But the move failed spectacularly, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent bluntly blasting Dmitriev as a “Russian propagandist,” and NATO Amb. Matt Whitaker flatly rejected his overtures — saying the administration’s energy crackdown would continue. On one of the...

WASHINGTON — President Trump no longer plans to hold a second in-person summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin “in the immediate future” after Russia rejected Trump’s demand to stop the war in Ukraine along the current battle lines. “I don’t want to have a wasted meeting,” Trump told reporters Tuesday afternoon when asked why he axed the sitdown. “I don’t want to have a waste of time

President Trump no longer plans to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin for a second in-person summit “in the immediate future” after Russia rejected his demand to stop the war in Ukraine along the current battle lines. The White House announcement followed a Monday call between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, which a source familiar with the conversation said demonstrated the Kremlin’s unwillingness to commit to Trump’s strategy for peace. -snip- Trump exhorted both sides to lay down their arms following the third White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky since Trump returned to...

Ukrainian defense and national security officials are on their way to Washington to hammer out details of a proposed drone deal with the Trump administration, The Post has learned. Representatives of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense and its National Security and Defense Council will be working with their American counterparts Tuesday through Friday as Washington and Kyiv aim to solidify a defense agreement that would bind the countries closer together. “Following the results of the negotiations between the presidents of Ukraine and the United States, a Ukraine delegation will arrive to Washington from Sept. 29 to Oct. 2 for technical...

President Trump’s dramatic pronouncement Tuesday that Russia is a “paper tiger” is based on new US intelligence that shows the Kremlin is spiraling toward economic ruin and battlefield defeat as a result of its invasion of Ukraine. Meanwhile, Trump’s insistence in the same statement that Ukraine can regain all the land currently occupied by Russia is the president’s latest “strategic move” to try and bring Russia to the negotiating table, sources inside and outside the White House told The Post Wednesday. -snip- “The president is making it very clear that Russia is in a very weak position,” White House press...

Special Presidential Envoy Keith Kellogg on Monday said he and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently advised President Trump that Russia is losing its war on Ukraine — as Moscow has seen more than 1 million casualties while taking less than 1% of Ukrainian territory since November 2022. Speaking at the Yalta European Security Conference in Kyiv, Kellogg revealed he and the chairman, Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, each reassured the president of Moscow’s wilting position roughly six weeks ago — shortly before Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska. -snip- “I responded quite forcefully,...

Russia unleashed a sweeping aerial assault across Ukraine late Wednesday, pounding Kyiv with ballistic missiles and swarms of drones — killing at least 14 people, including 3 children and injuring over 20. “Many people are under the rubble, [including] children,” Andriy Yermak, top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, told The Post. The barrage began around 9:30 p.m., setting off air raid sirens and prompting urgent shelter notification warnings in nearly every region nationwide. Missiles, drones, and bombs were spotted throughout the country, particularly in Kyiv, but also in western regions of the country where attacks have been rarer. At...

Russian reporters are whining about having to sleep on cots and being served old tuna for breakfast while covering the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska — but their own country may actually be to blame. The Kremlin journalists griped that they’ve had to rough it on portable beds with no sheets set up at the Alaska Airlines Center sports arena in Anchorage, where they were hardly able to make phone calls. They — gasp — even had to get by without bottled water. “After being assigned for [Thursday] night to what appeared to be a disaster evacuation zone, Russian journalists were...

President Trump will only meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin if the dictator also meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, The Post can exclusively reveal. “Putin must meet with Zelensky for the meeting to occur,” a White House official told The Post. “No location has been set.” Moscow on Thursday claimed that Moscow and Washington agreed “in principle” to hold a one-of-one meeting of Putin and Trump — hours after the latter said he still wasn’t sure whether the Kremlin was “tapping [him] along.” “An agreement was agreed in principle to hold a bilateral summit meeting in the coming days,...

Israeli spies infiltrated the heart of Iran before Friday morning’s Operation Rising Lion airstrikes and damaged the country’s missile infrastructure and air defenses in a series of covert operations. Intelligence agents with Israel’s Mossad smuggled in weaponry that destroyed defense measures inside Iran, which threatened Israeli military capabilities. Agents deployed “significant measures” on large quantities of special weaponry and deployed them across Iran, targeting designated areas, an Israeli security source told The Post. “Significant intelligence was gathered and surveillance was conducted to incriminate senior members of the Iranian defense establishment and nuclear scientists who were eliminated,” the source said. “This...

President Trump again pushed for a 30-day cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine Thursday after speaking by phone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, promising to “stay committed to securing Peace” after earlier threatening to walk away from talks between the warring nations. “Talks with Russia/Ukraine continue,” Trump, 78, posted to Truth Social. “The U.S. calls for, ideally, a 30-day unconditional ceasefire. Hopefully, an acceptable ceasefire will be observed, and both Countries will be held accountable for respecting the sanctity of these direct negotiations.” “If the ceasefire is not respected, the U.S. and its partners will impose further sanctions,” he added. Zelensky,...

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special presidential envoys Steve Witkoff and Gen. Keith Kellogg kicked off high-stakes talks in France Thursday with European and Ukrainian officials — marking the first time that both envoys were at the negotiation table to discuss an end to the war. The trio met with French President Emmanuel Macron as well as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff Andrii Yermak, senior administration officials told The Post. The State Department had announced Wednesday that Rubio and Witkoff would make the trip to France, but gave a vague description of the visit in a...

The Trump administration raised the temperature with Denmark Thursday ahead of Vice President JD Vance’s trip to Greenland — accusing the Danes of “mistreating” Greenlandic people against the backdrop of President Trump openly talking about annexing the island. “The Vice President and Second Lady are embarking on a historic expedition with their visit to Greenland, where the Vice President will emphasize the importance of bolstering [Arctic] security in places like Pituffik Space Base,” a senior White House official said. “Unfortunately, Danish leaders have spent decades mistreating the Greenlandic people, treating them like second class citizens and allowing infrastructure on the...

Ukraine reportedly launched at least 337 drones into Russia on Tuesday in the largest-yet drone attack of the Moscow-Kyiv conflict, according to the Russian Ministry of Defense. It came just before US and Ukrainian delegations were scheduled to meet for negotiation discussions in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on Tuesday. Russia set the previous drone-attack record a little over two weeks ago, when it launched 267 drones at Ukraine in a single night on Feb. 23. Ukrainian officials have yet to comment on the Russian report.

They’re small, but mighty — and deadly, too. The Ukrainian Armed Forces’ reliance on cheaper, more compact drones has altered the look of warfare for good, operators and experts tell The Post. Instead of the hulking craft used by nations like the US — which cost hundreds of millions of dollars — many of Ukraine’s aerial attacks against Russian forces are conducted with simple kamikaze drones worth between $300 and $1,000. If flown by an experienced pilot, a 6.5-pound drone found in any hobby shop can carry enough explosives to take out an armored vehicle, Andrii Federov, the co-founder and...

The US won’t repeat the mistakes of the Iraq War by failing to secure valuable resources from Ukraine in exchange for help ending Russia’s nearly three-year-old invasion, President Trump’s special envoy to the conflict exclusively told The Post. “When you look at the mineral deposits in that country, we’re not talking millions of dollars. We’re talking — virtually every region, we’re talking about billions, and then some regions are [worth] trillions,” retired Gen. Keith Kellogg said this week. “You can come up with a deal, and that’s what [Trump] has the Treasury looking at: ‘OK, how do you make a...

“I’m also going to ask Saudi Arabia and OPEC to bring down the cost of oil. You got to bring it down, which frankly, I’m surprised they didn’t do before the election,” Trump told the global elites gathered at the yearly meeting. “If the price came down, the Russia-Ukraine war would end immediately. Right now, the price is high enough that that war will continue. You’ve got to bring down the oil price. You’re going to end that war.” Kellogg explained that the price of oil is roughly $70 per barrel, meaning huge cash flows for Moscow to continue funding...

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Friday... Biden, 82, “wrestled” with the decision to pardon his son for any and all crimes he committed between 2014 and 2024 — but it was a visit by Clyburn, 84, that tipped the scales and led the president to go back on his repeated promises not to do so.

On the surface, it’s hard not to see visions of World War III in Russia’s recent threats and provocations against the West. -snip- But far from being on the brink of global armageddon, experts tell The Post these moves amount to the same old irresponsible nuclear saber-rattling Putin has long been known for. More to the point, they show that the Russian dictator is becoming increasingly desperate in the lead-up to President-elect Donald Trump’s second term. “It’s certainly signaling to the west. I think the Russians are obviously concerned that we’ve allowed Ukraine this permission to strike in Russia with...

The truth is out there. Or is it? More than 20 reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) — “UFOs,” in layman’s terms — made over the past year have stumped the Defense Department and “merit further analysis,” according to the UAP program’s annual report released Thursday. Between May 1, 2023, and June 1, the Pentagon’s “all-domain anomaly resolution office” (AARO) received 757 reports of sightings — 485 of which referenced new sightings over that period while the remainder occurred between 2021 and 2022. Among those are 21 reports that AARO director Jon Kosloski said warrant additional investigation — and some...