Ukraine-Russia war live: Zelensky blocks drone sales as he waits for Trump to resume peace talks with Putin

Volodymyr Zelensky has pushed back against US president Donald Trump’s recent assertion that Washington has no need for Ukrainian drone technology.

“No, we don’t need their help on drone defense,” Trump said in a Fox News Radio interview that aired Friday.

Zelensky said Washington had reached out to Ukraine “several times” to request assistance for a particular country or for support for Americans, without giving specifics. He said the requests had come from various US military institutions to Ukraine’s ministry of defence and other military leaders.

“All our institutions received these requests, and we responded to them,” Zelensky said.

He said he had offered Washington a defence cooperation deal last year worth $35bn-$50bn that would have given the US administration access to technology from roughly 200 Ukrainian drone, AI and electronic warfare firms, with half of all production earmarked for partners, primarily the US.

Zelensky said American military officials had expressed strong interest in the proposal, and Trump himself had indicated he was receptive.

“We received a message from them, and directly from the president as well, that they are interested,” Zelensky told reporters. “We did not sign the document with President Trump. I do not have an answer as to why. Perhaps it will happen later, but I am not sure.”

Speaking with Meet the Press anchor Kristen Welker on Saturday, the president knocked Zelensky for offering assistance to the US and Middle Eastern countries, the latter of which the Ukrainian president said on Friday were seeking his aid in sharing drone detection technology.

The “last person we need help from is Zelensky,” Trump told Welker.

The Trump administration has repeatedly declared victory while the US and Israel continue to launch attacks in recent days. Iranian forces, in response, have largely closed off the Strait of Hormuz, choking global shipping traffic.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said he was ready for the next round of trilateral peace talks to end Russia’s more than four-year-old invasion of Ukraine, but that it was up to Washington and Moscow to agree on where and when to meet.

Zelensky said the US had proposed hosting the next meeting between American, Ukrainian and Russian negotiating teams, which include US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, but Moscow had refused to send a delegation.

“We are waiting for a response from the Americans. Either they will change the country where we meet, or the Russians must confirm the US,” Zelensky said in a media briefing on Saturday. “We are not blocking any of these initiatives. We want a trilateral meeting to take place,” he said.

The US has postponed its sponsored talks between the two sides due to the war in the Middle East. The Iran war, which erupted on 28 February following US-Israeli strikes on Iran and spread across the region, has drawn the international spotlight away from Ukraine’s plight as it strives to hold back Russia’s bigger army.

A Swedish court on Sunday ordered the detention of the Russian captain of a ship that was suspected to be sailing under a false flag in the Baltic Sea and was boarded by authorities last week.

The commander of the Sea Owl 1, whose name hasn’t been released, was arrested on Friday — the day after the Swedish coast guard boarded the vessel off Trelleborg, on Sweden’s southern coast.

Prosecutors suspect him of using a false document. They said Sunday that the district court in Ystad ordered him held in custody in line with their request, Swedish news agency TT reported.

The tanker was sailing under the flag of the Comoros, an island nation off East Africa. But the coast guard has said that it suspects it isn’t in the shipping registry there and therefore there is no flag state to vouch for safety on board.

Volodymyr Zelensky has said the treatment from Ukraine’s European allies over the Druzbha oil pipeline is a “blackmail”.

The Ukrainian branch of the Druzhba oil pipeline, which supplies Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia, was severely ⁠damaged by fire after a Russian attack, Ukraine’s energy minister Denys Shmyhal told Interfax Ukraine on Tuesday.

Zelensky said Ukraine is now facing European pressure to allow oil to flow from the pipeline which has been disconnected since an attack in January.

“If we have decided to restore Russian oil supplies, then I want them to know that I am against it. … But if I am given conditions that Ukraine will not receive weapons, then, excuse me, I am powerless on this issue; I told our friends in Europe that this is called blackmail,” Zelensky said in reported remarks.

The European Commission has proposed sending a fact-finding mission to inspect the damage to the Druzhba pipeline in an attempt to resolve the dispute.

Ukraine is waiting for the US and Russian officials to continue the next round of trilateral peace talks, Volodymy Zelensky said.

Zelensky said the US had proposed hosting a meeting but Russia has refused to send a delegation to take the talks forward.

“We are waiting for a response from the Americans,” he said.

This comes at a time the US is reportedly losing interest in brokering an end to the war in Ukraine.

“A pause has indeed appeared in the talks. The Americans have other priorities, and that’s understandable,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told the Financial Times.

Volodymyr Zelensky has said foreign countries and firms willing to buy Ukrainian drones should not be able to bypass the Ukrainian government by talking directly to manufacturers.

The Ukrainian war-time president said a new system was needed to prevent this from happening and that his administration has already reprimanded one manufacturer for selling interceptors without considering the implications for Ukraine’s defences.

His remarks come at a time the war in the Middle East has put a spotlight on Ukraine’s defence capabilities, honed in the continuing war against Russia, especially against the Iranian Shahed drones.

Zelensky has warned private drone makers in Ukraine should not pursue direct export deals outside of government oversight.

“I have never heard that the United States isn’t interested. I have heard the opposite – that the United States is very interested,” Zelensky said, speaking to reporters in Kyiv over the weekend.

Volodymyr Zelensky has said Ukraine wants money and technology in return for helping Middle Eastern nations that have sought its expertise as they defend against Iranian kamikaze drones.

The Zelensky administration has already sent its specialists to the war-hit region as several of the US and Israel’s allies fight off incoming Iranian Shahed drones, which Ukraine has gained superiority over in the more than four-year-old war against Russia.

Zelensky told reporters that three teams were sent to the Middle East to conduct expert assessments and demonstrate how drone defences should operate. Earlier this week he said teams were sent to Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, as well as a US military base in Jordan.

Kenya’s foreign minister is visiting Russia this week under pressure back home to convince Moscow to stop recruiting Kenyans into its military, but Nairobi “ like other governments in Africa“ is unlikely to take too confrontational an approach.

Reports in recent weeks revealed the scope and scale of the recruitment of Africans into Russia’s depleted forces, often via third parties offering lucrative civilian jobs, triggering anger in countries like Kenya, Ghana and South Africa.

Families want more action to bring the recruits home but African governments, wary about overtly taking sides during Russia’s war in Ukraine, have avoided angering Moscow, mindful that the recruitment scandal has not yet triggered widespread public outcry or political heat.

“We want Kenyans stopped – they should not be enlisted at all,” Musalia Mudavadi, Kenya’s minister for foreign affairs, told Reuters ahead of his trip. “We are getting a lot of pressure from some of the affected families who are now gathering more courage to come forward and speak to the issue,” he said.

However, Mudavadi said he was pragmatic and realistic over the issue, describing Russia as a superpower with which Nairobi has had a long relationship.

“It’s not a confrontation,” he said. “This is about speaking to issues as they are and the distress that they’re causing to the Kenyan people, and we need a joint effort to be able to resolve it,” he said.

“Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” which takes on the Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s propaganda and patriotism program for the nation’s youth after its invasion of Ukraine, has won the Oscar for best documentary feature.

“In the name of our future, in the name of all of our children, stop all of these wars now,” the film’s protagonist and co-director Pavel Talankin said in Russian from the stage through a translator.

Talankin was a teacher and activities director in a small-town school in Russia who captured his students’ lessons, chants and songs promoting the war in Ukraine on video. He smuggled his hard drives out of the country to collaborate with American director David Borenstein, who lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The two men gave the night some of its most overtly political moments during their speeches. Borenstein spoke broadly about nations tipping into totalitarianism, while clearly emphasizing similarities between his country and Talankin’s.

“‘Mr. Nobody Against Putin’ is about how you lose your country,” Borenstein said. “You lose it through countless small little acts of complicity,” he said.

Cheers in the auditorium grew as Borenstein said you lose a country when “we don’t say anything” when governments kill people in the streets and oligarchs seek to consolidate control over media outlets.

“We all face a moral choice, but luckily even a nobody is more powerful than you think,” Borenstein said.

The war in Ukraine has loomed large in Oscar documentary categories since it began. The Associated Press’ documentary “20 Days in Mariupol” won best documentary feature in 2024.

This year’s documentary short nominees included “Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud,” about an American journalist killed in the war.