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U.S. President Donald Trump's envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, said Russia's concern over the eastward enlargement of NATO was fair and the United States did not want to see Ukraine in the U.S.-led military alliance. Asked by U.S. network ABC News about a Reuters report that Russia wanted a written pledge over NATO not enlarging eastwards to include Ukraine and other former Soviet republics, Kellogg said: "It's a fair concern." -snip- Kellogg said the sequencing of the peace talks would include an attempt to merge the two memorandums drafted by Ukraine and Russia into one single document with talks in...

The Kremlin expects Russia and Ukraine to discuss the list of conditions for a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine next week in Istanbul, its spokesman said on Friday, praising the U.S. role in mediating the talks. Russia has proposed holding the second round of talks with Ukraine in Istanbul on June 2. However, Ukraine wants to see Russia's proposals for a peace deal before it sends a delegation to Turkey, Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said on Friday. -snip- "At the moment, everyone is focused on the direct Russia-Ukraine negotiations. A list of conditions for a temporary truce is being...

"If Wagner retreats from Bakhmut now, the whole front will collapse," Yevgeny Prigozhin said in a video published over the weekend. "The situation will not be sweet for all military formations protecting Russian interests."...the ammunition that his forces were promised by Moscow in February had not yet been shipped. "For now, we are trying to figure out the reason: is it just ordinary bureaucracy or a betrayal," Prigozhin said on his usual press service Telegram channel.

The withdrawal of Russian forces from a strategically important town in eastern Ukraine has prompted two powerful allies of President Vladimir Putin to do something rare in modern Russia: publicly ridicule the war machine's top brass. Russia's loss of the bastion of Lyman, which puts western parts of Luhansk region under threat, touched a nerve for Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of the southern Russian republic of Chechnya. Kadyrov, who has been close to Putin since his father and former president of Chechnya, Akhmad, was killed in a 2004 bomb attack in Grozny that also killed a Reuters photographer, suggested that...

Ukrainian forces achieved their biggest breakthrough in the south of the country since the war began, bursting through the front and advancing rapidly along the Dnipro River on Monday, threatening to encircle thousands of Russian troops. Kyiv gave no official confirmation of the gains, but Russian sources acknowledged that a Ukrainian tank offensive had advanced dozens of kilometers (miles) along the river’s west bank, recapturing a number of villages along the way. “The information is tense, let’s put it that way, because, yes there were indeed breakthroughs,” Vladimir Saldo, the Russian-installed leader in occupied parts of Ukraine’s Kherson province told...