Ukraine-Russia war latest: Trump to discuss new sanctions on Moscow this week after largest aerial attack of war

Ukraine’s foreign minister will visit Hungary this week, Hungary’s Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto told a briefing on Monday.

It comes amid tensions between Kyiv and Budapest driven by conflicts over minority rights in Ukraine.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is a vehement critic of Ukraine and its fight to ward off Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Hungary, which gets most of its energy from Russia, has refused to send weapons to Ukraine, and Orban is also strongly opposed to Ukraine joining the EU.

The German government said on Monday that Russia’s latest attacks on Ukraine mark an escalation that shows Putin’s unwillingness to negotiate.

“This ongoing escalation of the war shows that Putin does not want to negotiate – he wants to continue to create facts,” the spokesperson said.

“And this can only be stopped by enabling Ukraine to maintain its defence and not allowing Putin to succeed.”

Ukraine’s energy ministry said the country is experiencing localised blackouts and gas outages on Monday.

“The goal is obvious: to cause even more hardship to the peaceful population of Ukraine, to leave Ukrainian homes, hospitals, kindergartens and schools without light and heat,” the ministry wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

It comes after Russian forces claimed to have hit Ukrainian energy infrastructure, according to Interfax.

The Russian news agency reported the claims on Monday after Ukraine’s energy ministry said Russia attacked a thermal power generation facility in the Kyiv region.

Polish border guards found drone debris in a village near the border with Belarus, a prosecutor said on Monday.

It is the latest in a series of similar incidents in the NATO member country that borders Ukraine.

Poland has been on high alert for objects entering its airspace since two people died after a stray Ukrainian missile struck a southern Polish village in 2022.

“This drone crashed at the border crossing, approximately 300 meters from the border crossing, in the village of Polatycze. The drone is unarmed, and there are Cyrillic inscriptions on it,” said Agnieszka Kepka from the prosecutor’s office in the eastern city of Lublin.

Military police are questioning witnesses and were checking surveillance data to determine the trajectory of the drone, she said in a televised press conference.

No one was injured in the incident, police said.

On Saturday, an object likely to be a smuggling drone rather than a weapon fell in eastern Poland, a defence ministry spokesperson said.

In August, a drone crashed into a cornfield in eastern Poland, scorching crops and shattering windows in nearby homes. A prosecutor investigating the incident said at the time it appeared to have entered Poland from the direction of Belarus, an ally of Russia.

Military drones have also crashed in Romania and the Baltic states.

Ukraine’s Prime Minister has said Russia’s aerial attack on Kyiv has marked a “new stage” in the war.

Posting on X, she said on Monday she had met with sixty heads of diplomatic missions to brief them on the attack.

“For Ukraine, yesterday’s attack marks a new stage of this war,” Yulia Svyrydenk wrote. “Russia has doubled the number of drones aimed at civilians, is deliberately striking energy infrastructure on the eve of winter, systematically hunting down our enterprises, and now targeting state institutions themselves.

“This is not the conduct of a country seeking peace. It is a direct mockery of every diplomatic effort made by the civilized world.”

“No sanctions” will be enough to make Russia change its position, a Kremlin spokesperson has said.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Dmitry Peskov said: “No sanctions will be able to force the Russian Federation to change the consistent position that our president has repeatedly spoken about.”

He added Europe and Ukraine are doing everything they can to draw the United States into their orbit.

He said the Kremlin’s preference was to resolve the conflict through diplomatic means but if that was impossible then what Putin calls the “special military operation” would continue.

It comes just hours after both the United States and European Union indicated they were considering additional sanctions.

The European Union’s preparation of new sanctions against Russia is being closely coordinated with the United States, EU Council President Antonio Costa said on Monday.

US President Donald Trump said on Sunday he is ready to move to a second phase of sanctioning Russia, and that individual European leaders would visit the US on Monday or Tuesday to discuss how to resolve the Russian-Ukraine war.

Germany’s foreign minister said on Monday that Russia is going out of its way to avoid a summit with Ukraine and the United States and instead continues to attack Ukraine.

“Three weeks after the Alaska summit, we have to realise that Russia is using every excuse to continue its war and to avoid a tripartite summit,” Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said in a speech to a gathering of ambassadors in Berlin.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has condemned Russian attacks on Kyiv over the weekend as “cowardly” and “brutal”.

In a post on X, he wrote: “Russia brutally attacked Ukraine last night, killing innocent civilians in residential areas and damaging the Cabinet of Ministers building.

“My thoughts are with the injured and everyone who is mourning their loved ones.”