President Volodymyr Zelenskiy arrived in the United States on Sunday for a crucial visit to lay out Kiev's plan to end the two-and-a-half-year war with Russia.The Ukrainian president is due to present what he called a “victory plan” to President Joe Biden, presidential candidate Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, and also attend a session of the United Nations General Assembly. The visit comes after a summer of fierce fighting that saw Moscow advance rapidly through eastern Ukraine and Kiev hold large swaths of Russia's Kursk region. Kiev has also been pressuring Western countries for weeks to allow it to deploy long-range weapons to strike targets deep inside Russian territory, but so far to no avail.
In a post on X, the Ukrainian president called on partners in his nightly video address to help achieve “the common victory for a truly just peace.” “This fall will determine the future of this war,” Zelenskiy said, speaking from a plane after Ukrainian media reported he had arrived in New York. He is due to visit Washington later in the week.
President Zelensky began his trip with a visit to a munitions factory in Pennsylvania that produces one of Ukraine's most urgently needed weapons.Democratic Rep. Matt Cartwright, who met with Zelenskiy at the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant, said the president's message was simple: “Thank you, and we need more.” The Scranton plant is one of the few facilities that makes 155mm artillery shells domestically and has increased production over the past year. Ukraine has already received more than 3 million shells from the United States.
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy suggested delicate negotiations were underway with the White House to allow Ukraine to use Storm Shadow missiles inside Russia, and argued that now was a time that called for “courage and guts”.The apparent encouragement to Biden came just a week after a visit by Mr Lammy and Prime Minister Keir Starmer to the US president at the White House failed to resolve tough issues between the two countries. “This is a crucial moment that calls for courage, grit, perseverance and fortitude on the part of our allies who stand with Ukraine,” Mr Lammy said at a side event at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool on Sunday.
A fake news website registered in the UK and resembling a reputable British media outlet is suspected of spreading disinformation about Western companies operating in Ukraine. The suspected Russian propaganda operation has led MPs to call for changes to the law to require UK-registered news sites to reveal their owners, as is done in the EU. The two sites, londoninsider.co.uk and talk-finance.co.uk, are in English and registered in the UK but their articles are picked up and distributed in Ukraine, where British media has a reputation for credibility and trustworthiness. The use of these sites has been highlighted by Sarn, a US company active in Ukraine in the energy and military hardware sectors. The company says articles on the two sites make false accusations of arms trafficking, judicial fraud and embezzlement.
Russia launched new attacks in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, striking a high-rise apartment block and wounding at least 21 people in two successive nighttime attacks, authorities said.The bomb was dropped on Saturday night in the Shevchenkovsky district, north of the center of Ukraine's second-largest city, Kharkiv, local governor Oleh Shniekhbov said.
Russia's Ministry of Emergency Situations said on Sunday that a firefighter had been killed by a Ukrainian drone in Russia-controlled Luhansk Oblast in eastern Ukraine.Vyacheslav Glazunov, 33, was trying to put out a fire caused by a falling drone in the Novoaidar district when an explosive device from the drone detonated, the ministry said in a Telegram message, adding that two firefighters were injured.
