Closing summary
At a press conference in London, Keir Starmer said the coalition of the willing will act to take Russia’s oil and gas “off the global market” and says it will “choke off funding for Russia’s war”. He said he is determined to push on with releasing funds from Russia’s frozen assets and highlighted the need to move at speed for reparations.
Zelenskyy said Russia is carrying out a campaign of terror against Ukraine’s energy system, aiming to make “winter cold” for civilians to pressure Ukraine. He said diplomacy matters only when it leads to real decisions. He added that sanctions, long-range weapons, accountability for war crimes and real actions on frozen Russian assets are the priority.
Ukraine will have to find a way to produce air defence systems domestically, Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the press conference. Since the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine, Kyiv has ramped up weapons production, with nearly 60% of weapons now domestically produced, but it still depends on western supplies for air defence systems and missiles.
Nato chief Mark Rutte said it is a decision for the individual allies of Ukraine to decide which weapons it wants to supply, when asked if he believes the US will provide long-range Tomahawk missiles. He said that, since July, crucial weaponry has been provided by the US to Ukraine. “The issue remains under review by the president and, of course, that is up to the US to decide,” he concluded.
Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen said European finances will boost Ukraine’s war effort and says “significant steps” have been taken this week to target Russia’s energy sector. She said she thinks Putin’s strategy has been to wait for Ukraine’s allies to give up and says “we are willing to continue”. She added that allies in the “coalition of the willing” must reach a solution on reparation loans for Ukraine before Christmas.
The ringleader of an arson attack on Ukraine-linked businesses in London last year was on Friday jailed for 17 years for what prosecutors described as “a sustained campaign of terrorism and sabotage on UK soil”. Dylan Earl, 21, admitted aggravated arson over the 2024 blaze which targeted companies delivering satellite equipment from Elon Musk’s Starlink to Ukraine, Reuters reported.
The Russian defence ministry said on Friday that its forces had taken control of three more villages in eastern Ukraine, Russian agencies reported. According to the ministry, Russian troops have taken Bolohivka in the Kharkiv region, Promin in the Donetsk region, as well as Zlagoda in the Dnipropetrovsk region.
Russian president Vladimir Putin’s special envoy Kirill Dmitriev was in the US for meetings with Trump administration officials including special envoy Steve Witkoff, according to media reports on Friday. Dmitriev was expected to meet Trump administration officials “to continue discussions about the US-Russia relationship,” CNN reported, citing sources with knowledge of the visit.
A man detonated an explosive device as border guards checked documents at a railway station in northern Ukraine on Friday, killing himself and three women, the State Border Guard Service said. It said in a statement that 12 other people were hurt in the blast at the station in Ovruch, close to the border with Belarus, and that a border guard was among the dead, who were aged 29, 58 and 82.
A team of senior EU officials will meet Chinese counterparts next week for urgent talks aimed at disentangling Europe from the ongoing trade war between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. They are battling to persuade Beijing to ease the restrictions they have imposed on both exports of rare earths and semiconductors critical to car production.
Spanish police said Friday that a Pablo Picasso painting that vanished en route to an exhibition has been found, raising doubts if it was ever loaded onto a transport truck. “Still Life with Guitar”, a 1919 gouache and pencil work valued at about 600,000 euros (£523,000), disappeared in early October while being transported from Madrid to the southern city of Granada.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy urges US to expand sanctions on Russian oil across whole sector
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday urged the United States to expand sanctions on Russian oil from two companies to the whole sector, and appealed for long-range missiles to hit back at Russia.
The Ukrainian leader said Trump’s decision this week to impose oil sanctions was “a big step” and said “we have to apply pressure not only to Rosneft and Lukoil, but to all Russian oil companies”, reports AP.
“Besides, we are carrying out our own campaign of pressure with drones and missiles specifically targeting the Russian oil sector,” he said at a news conference at the Foreign Office in London.
