Officials from Kyiv and Washington met in Riyadh’s grand Ritz-Carlton hotel last night, to discuss a partial ceasefire in Ukraine.

The meeting addressed the “complex technical issues” of a ceasefire on energy infrastructure, Kyiv’s defence minister Rustem Umerov said on X.

After the meeting concluded, Mr Umerov hailed the “productive and focussed” talks, adding that Ukraine is working to secure just and lasting peace for all of Europe.

Talks between the US and Russia have begun in Saudi Arabia, Russian state media reports.

In an intense round of diplomacy, US officials will hold simultaneous talks with their counterparts from Kyiv and Moscow as they look to push through a 30-day partial ceasefire in Ukraine.

The delegations will also discuss the prospect of a longer-term peace deal following the initial ceasefire.

Ukraine’s air force said it shot down 57 drones out of 99 launched by Russia overnight.

Another 36 imitator drones did not reach their targets, it said. It did not specify what happened to the remaining six drones.

Steve Witkoff said the Labour leader’s idea of a peacekeeping force made up of the ‘coalition of the willing’ was based on a “simplistic” notion of thinking “we have all got to be like Winston Churchill”.

Mr Witkoff is leading the US ceasefire negotiations with Russia and Ukraine.

A US delegation will seek progress toward a Black Sea ceasefire and a broader cessation of violence in the war in Ukraine when it meets for talks with Russian officials today, held after separate discussions with diplomats from Ukraine.

A source briefed on the planning for the talks said the US side was being led by Andrew Peek, a senior director at the White House National Security Council, and Michael Anton, a senior State Department official.

They met the Ukrainians last night and plan to sit down with the Russians this morning.

The White House says the aim of the talks is to reach a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea, allowing the free flow of shipping

The Russian and US delegations plan to begin their talks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia at 7am GMT (10am Moscow time), the Russian state news TASS agency reported, citing an unnamed source.

The ceasefire negotiations will be held on the same day as separate talks take place between the US and Ukrainian officials, also in Saudi Arabia.

On the eve of the talks, US special envoy Steve Witkoff expressed optimism about the chances for ending Europe’s deadliest conflict since the Second World War.

The fate of currently Russia-occupied Ukrainian territory will be one of the key areas of discussion at the talks in Saudi Arabia today.

Russian forces have illegally occupied one-fifth of Ukraine since they launched the full-scale military invasion over three years ago.

Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz was asked yesterday if the US would accept a peace deal in which Russia was allowed to keep Ukrainian territory.

He replied: “We have to ask ourselves, is it in our national interest? Is it realistic?… Are we going to drive every Russian off of every inch of Ukrainian soil?”

Ukraine says it already recognises that it cannot recapture some occupied Ukrainian territory by force and that it will have to be returned diplomatically over time.

Kyiv says, however, that it will never recognise Russian sovereignty over Ukrainian territory.

US officials are due to meet negotiators from Ukraine and from Russia in Saudi Arabia today to discuss the details of a proposed 30-day ceasefire on strikes on energy infrastructure, as well as a longer-term peace deal.

The halt on infrastructure attacks was loosely agreed in talks between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump last week, with a 30-day timeline.

But that narrowly defined ceasefire was quickly cast into doubt, with Moscow saying Ukraine hit an oil depot in southern Russia while Kyiv said Russia had struck hospitals and homes, and knocked out power to some railways.

Last week Mr Zelensky said Kyiv would draw up a list of facilities that could be subject to the partial ceasefire. That list could include not only energy, but also rail and port infrastructure, he said.

A moratorium on energy infrastructure strikes could favour Moscow more than Kyiv, given it would prevent Ukraine from conducting long-range strikes on Russian oil facilities, a key way that it has inflicted pain on its enemy.

The electronic hum in the sky above told him that the Russians were on a hunting safari and that he was the prey. Leaping from his bicycle, Oleksandr left its wheels spinning as he bolted through a hole in a fence hoping to find cover.

Horrified to discover he was still in the open air, he threw himself against the fence, hoping to blend in, to somehow hide. The drone tracked sideways, hung above him, and dropped its bomb.

The explosion tore a chunk of his leg away.

Ukrainians living in bombed-out Kherson tell world affairs editor Sam Kiley how Russian drones target them as they go about their daily lives – and how their brutal injuries are cared for in a hospital forced underground:

Russia’s air defence units intercepted and destroyed 28 Ukrainian drones overnight, the Russian defence ministry said this morning.

Of these, 12 drones were downed each over the border Kursk region and the southern Russia Rostov region, the ministry said on its Telegram channel.

The remaining four were destroyed over Crimea, the Krasnodar region and the waters of the Sea of Azov, the ministry added.

Venezuela said on Saturday it would resume accepting deportation flights from the United States after reaching an agreement with the Trump administration after the president invoked the Alien and Enemies Act in order to expedite the removal of Venezeulans to prison in El Salvador.

“Migration isn’t a crime, and we will not rest until we achieve the return of all of those in need and rescue our brothers kidnapped in El Salvador,” a representative for the Venezuelan government said in a statement obtained by the New York Times.

Trump had invoked the Alien and Enemies Act of 1798 to deport Venezuelan migrants, who he claimed were members of the gang Tren de Araguas, without due process. A federal judge placed a temporary injunction on the flights.

It is unclear who was on the flights or if they are members of the Venezuelan gang. Officials admitted that many of the individuals do not have criminal records.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk are in Philadelphia this evening to attend the NCAA wrestling finals.

They arrived in the city just before 7pm EST.

The U.S. Navy, under the orders of Donald Trump, has deployed a second destroyer to patrol the waters near the US-Mexico border, according to the US Northern Command.

Naval officials said in a Saturday news release that the USS Spruance departed Naval base San Diego and will assist in “combating maritime related terrorism, weapons proliferation, transnational crime, piracy, environmental destruction, and illegal seaborne immigration.”

The U.S. Navy sent another destroyer to the region last week.

Republican Representative Jim Jordan and Senator Dave McCormick will be joining Donald Trump and Elon Musk at the NCAA wrestling finals in Philadelphia on Saturday evening.

The event kicks off at 7pm EST.

Trump told reporters on Friday he was supportive of the wrestlers and excited for the championship showdown.

“We’re going to the big fight. … They have the NCAA, world, wrestling for college. And I’ve always supported the wrestlers,” Trump told reporters. “So, I want to support them. These are the great college wrestlers from the various schools. I think Penn State is leading, and Nebraska is in second place right now. And a lot of good things.”

Columbia University has largely agreed to a series of sweeping changes the Trump administration demanded from the university to restore $400 million in suspended federal funding.

The university will give police new powers to arrest students, partially ban face masks, and appoint a university official to oversee changes at a suite of university departments.

Kamala Harris topped a new poll on who Democrats would back in the 2028 presidential primary if it was held today, with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in third place.

Despite losing the 2024 election to Donald Trump, the former vice president was backed by 36 percent of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters in Morning Consult’s latest poll.

New York’s Ocasio-Cortez, who is currently touring the U.S. to rally against Trump’s policies with Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, was in third place with 5 percent. Sanders, an Independent, sought the Democratic nomination in 2016 and 2020.

Harris’s former running-mate Tim Walz was also tied with Ocasio-Cortez at 5 percent, as was California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is often touted as a future party leader despite little national experience.

President Donald Trump confused reporters on Friday afternoon after claiming he “didn’t sign” the presidential proclamation that invoked the controversial Alien and Enemies Act in order to quickly deport migrants the administration says are part of a Venezuelan gang.

When asked by a reporter about signing the proclamation “in the dark” – rather than at the Oval Office desk or in a public capacity as the president has done with other executive actions – the president denied signing it at all.

“I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it,” Trump said on the South Lawn of the White House on Friday. “Other people handled it. But Marco Rubio’s done a great job. And he wanted them out, and we go along with that. We want to get criminals out of our country.”

Despite his claim, the president’s digital signature does appear on the version of the proclamation available on the Federal Register website.

The White House later clarified that the president was referring to the original Alien Enemies Act, passed by Congress in 1798 and did sign the recent proclamation that invokes the highly controversial set of laws.

“President Trump was obviously referring to the original Aliens Enemies Act that was signed back in 1798,” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said in a statement.

“The recent Executive Order was personally signed by President Trump invoking the Alien Enemies Act that designated Tren de Aragua as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in order to apprehend and deport these heinous criminals,” Cheung added.

Tim Naftali, a Nixon historian and research scholar at Columbia University, told The New York Times that it wasn’t damaging information in the JFK assassination files that meant they had been kept secret for decades.

It was, according to Naftali, to protect classified details about CIA intelligence-gathering – including their methods and sources.

Naftali said he found details in the newly released documents that had previously been omitted.

It includes details about the U.S. intercepting communications in Egypt, an ally.

As the Trump administration pushes out controversial policy changes, thousands of declassified files concerning the 1963 assassination of former President John F. Kennedy have been released.

While historians, journalists and amateur sleuths pour over the files looking for a scrap of anything new, many have speculated that their release is a “distraction” tactic by the administration.

The 2,200 files containing approximately 63,000 pages were posted by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration Tuesday evening after President Donald Trump ordered their release.

Trump boasted of the reams of paper that would be there for all to read; the internet largely reacted with anger.

Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of John F. Kennedy, said that second-cousin Robert F Kennedy Jr and Donald Trump only care about the assassinated former president’s “carcass”.

Schlossberg, 32, took to X on Wednesday to draw a stark comparison between his grandfather and the incumbent president.

“President Trump is obsessed with my grandfather — but not in his life or what he achieved in it. No, just like @robertfkennedyjr @realdonaldtrump is only interested in JFK’s carcass,” he wrote at the beginning of his thread.

He later wrote: “JFK fought fascism and Communism. Trump is selling us out to tech warlords, at home and abroad. JFK stood behind unions and labor, demanding healthcare, higher pay. Trump is stripping working families from lifesaving care, financial support.”

Many of the documents released on Tuesday were hand-written, or blurred scans making them difficult to read.

Some were typed more than half a century ago and others had portions of scratched-out information.

The documents were largely not categorized in an organized way – potentially extending the time to analyze the files by days.

President Donald Trump’s administration has released what are believed to be all the U.S. government’s remaining classified files on the assassination of President John F Kennedy in 1963.

For the first time, thousands of previously unseen pages of government documents are now available regarding the former president’s violent, untimely death in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza. The document dump also includes details relating to the assassinations of Senator Robert F Kennedy and civil rights leader Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

Two-thirds of the promised filed concerning the John F. Kennedy’s assassination have not been released, an expert on the incident claims.

On Monday, President Donald Trump promised the government would not redact “anything.” The National Archives wrote on its website that “all records previously withheld for classification” would be released.

Jefferson Morley, vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a nonprofit that operates a database of government records on the event, contested on Tuesday evening that only “two thirds” of the promised documents had been made public.

The ex-Washington Post reporter added that the release also didn’t include any of the recently discovered FBI files – after the bureau said it had discovered 2,400 new records related to the assassination last month – nor any of the 500-plus Internal Revenue Service records.

“Nonetheless, this is most positive news on the declassification of JFK files since the 1990s,” he added in his statement.

An unredacted CIA memo from June 1961, which was sent to JFK by aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr, contained harsh criticism of the agency months after its backing of Cuban exiles in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro’s government.

Another document dated January 1962 reveals details of “Operation Mongoose,” a top-secret CIA-led campaign authorized by JFK following the Bay of Pigs to again destabilize and thwart Castro’s Communist government.

In a letter penned to the British Embassy in 1978, Sergyj Czornonoh said that he warned authorities of Lee Harvey Oswald’s plan to assassinate John F. Kennedy months before the president was killed.

Czornonoh, who claimed he was detained in London on July 18, 1963, said he told authorities – and warned U.S. Vice Consul Tom Blackshear – of Oswald’s assassination plot.

The man claimed he was provided the details by “Mr. Wasilev,” who was working at the Soviet Embassy in Bulgaria.

Czornonoh allegedly warned State Department officials on August 19, 1963, that Oswald possessed a weapon.

Despite being mentioned previously in books, one CIA memo from July 1967 released on Tuesday cited an article from the magazine Ramparts about John Garrett Underhill Jr – believed to be CIA operative, Gary Underhill.

It states the day after JFK was gunned down, Underhill quickly left Washington, DC before he arrived at a friend’s house in New Jersey.

“He was very agitated. A small clique within the CIA was responsible for the assassination, he confided, and he was afraid for his life and probably would have to leave the country,” the memo read.

Underhill told his friends that JFK “got wind” of the attempt on his life but was “killed before he could ‘blow the whistle on it.’”

On May 8, 1964, Underhill was found dead in his Washington apartment, which the coroner ruled as suicide.

According to the memo, Underhill’s friends said before his death that he was “sober but badly shook” by the president’s assassination.

Russia’s aerial attacks on Ukrainian electricity and gas systems are estimated to have more than £11 billion in three years:

Four people were injured in the today’s second attack on railway infrastructure in he Dnipropetrovsk region, Ukraine’s state railway said.

“Four railway workers were injured, two of them in serious condition,” the organisation said. “They are receiving medical assistance.

“The attack was previously carried out by a ballistic missile.

“Railway workers made every effort to ensure that the hostile attacks did not affect the movement of passenger trains.”

Donald Trump has hailed a “very good telephone call” with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, which lasted around one hour.

“Much of the discussion was based on the call made yesterday with President Putin in order to align both Russia and Ukraine in terms of their requests and needs,” Mr Trump wrote on Truth Social.

“We are very much on track, and I will ask Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, to give an accurate description of the points discussed. That Statement will be put out shortly.”

Ukrainian boxing champion Oleksandr Usyk visited a destroyed energy plant in central Ukraine, shortly before Vladimir Putin agreed to immediately halt attacks on energy infrastructure in Ukraine.

Standing among the devastation of the central Ukrainian plant, the 38-year-old heavyweight saw first-hand the effects of Russia’s systematic and repeated attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in its attempt to weaken Kyiv’s war effort.

Usyk visited the site on Monday, just one day before Putin agreed to temporarily halt all attacks on energy infrastructure in a phone call with US president Donald Trump on Tuesday.

In their first talks since late February, presidents Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky will almost certainly be discussing the partial ceasefire agreed by Vladimir Putin yesterday.

The Russian autocrat agreed to halt all attacks on energy infrastructure for around a month during a phone call with Mr Trump on Tuesday.

But Ukrainian authorities accused Russia of striking energy facilities after the city of Slovyansk lost power overnight.

Moscow countered the claims, stating that it called off a drone attack on Ukrainian energy infrastructure and had shot down seven of its own drones. The Kremlin also accused Ukraine of targeting Russian energy targets overnight, including an alleged attack on an oil depot near the village of Kavkazskaya.

Mr Zelensky does not trust that Putin is an honest candidate for peace, and will likely make that clear to the US president.

Speaking on X yesterday about last night’s attacks, he said: “The fact that this night is no exception shows that the pressure on Russia must continue for the sake of peace.

“Today, Putin effectively rejected the proposal for a full ceasefire. It would be right for the world to respond by rejecting any attempts by Putin to prolong the war.”

Volodymyr Zelensky is currently speaking with US president Donald Trump for the first time in just under three weeks.

The last time the pair spoke produced one of the most infamous scenes in recent history, when Mr Trump and vice president JD Vance teamed up in a verbal attack of the Ukrainian president, who they accused of not showing enough gratitude to the US for its military support.

News anchors were left open-mouthed as Mr Zelensky was subsequently booted out of the Oval Office by his US counterpart, who told him not to return until he was “ready for peace”.

“You’re playing cards, you’re gambling with the lives of millions of people,” Mr Trump told Ukraine’s war leader. “You’re not in a good position right now,” Mr Zelensky was repeatedly told, in remarks which drew outrage from leaders around the world.

It kicked off when Mr Zelensky – who was officially at the White House to sign a crucial minerals deal with the US – repeatedly reiterated the need for US security guarantees in any future peace settlement, before Mr Vance accused him of not being grateful enough to the US.

President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are speaking by phone as Kyiv continues to weather attacks on energy infrastructure despite Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s claim to have ordered a halt to such attacks following a phone call with Trump one day earlier.

The White House said the call would take place Wednesday morning, and White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino confirmed on X (formerly Twitter) that the two leaders had been connected and were speaking as of 10:38 am ET.

White House correspondent Andrew Feinberg with the full report:

Volodymyr Zelensky has confirmed Wednesday’s prisoner exchange, describing it as “one of the largest” which has been held.

A total of 197 Ukrainians were released from Russia, including 175 detainees and 22 who were released “through measures beyond exchanges”.

“Thank you to our Ukrainian POW [prisoner of war] search and exchange team for this important work, for the results that give hope. And we are grateful to all our partners, especially the United Arab Emirates, for making today’s exchange possible,” the Ukrainian president wrote on Telegram.

“Ukraine remembers each and every one of our heroes, and we will definitely bring all of our people home.”

President Vladimir Putin wants Donald Trump to formally recognise the four Ukrainian regions occupied by Russian forces, a Russian outlet has reported.

Putin wants his US counterpart to recognise the eastern Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, which have been occupied since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, Kommersant reported, citing sources who attended a business event with Putin on Tuesday.

Moscow does not fully control any of the four regions.

The Russian autocrat also wants the US to recognise Crimea, southern land seized and annexed by Russia in 2014.

In return for recognition “in the near future”, Putin would not attempt to lay claim to the southern port city of Odesa or any other part of Ukraine, the report added.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday Putin and Trump had not discussed the idea on their Tuesday call.