US president Donald Trump has said “something may come out of” the CIA director John Ratcliffe’s visit to Moscow on Tuesday. Trump said the US is “working very hard” to end the war in Ukraine, calling the CIA chief a “fantastic guy”. Answering a question on Ratcliffe’s visit to Russia, Trump said that the CIA director made a visit to Russia on a “very semi-routine” basis and “something may come out of it”.
The Kremlin revealed yesterday that CIA director Ratcliffe held talks with Russian intelligence officials during a mysterious visit this week but did not meet president Vladimir Putin. Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov framed communication between the two countries’ intelligence agencies as positive. This comes as Kremlin sources said Russia is considering stepping up its ballistic missile strikes on Kyiv.
Putin is contemplating hitting targets in the city centre and on critical infrastructure elsewhere in Ukraine, after concluding that efforts to negotiate a peace deal have reached a dead end, they said. EU countries, including Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain and Poland, are urging Brussels to revive efforts to use immobilised Russian sovereign assets to fund Ukraine, the Financial Times reported today. A letter from a coalition of states to the European Commission will call on the EU's executive to restart work on plans to fund Ukraine using Russian central bank assets, the FT reported, citing four people briefed on the document.
Donald Trump has said “something may come out of” the CIA director John Ratcliffe’s visit to Moscow on Tuesday. The US is “working very hard” to end the war in Ukraine, he said. Russia is considering stepping up its ballistic missile strikes on Kyiv, including targets in the city centre, and on critical infrastructure elsewhere in Ukraine after concluding that efforts to negotiate a peace deal have reached a dead end, said three people close to the Kremlin.
Speaking to Bloomberg, they said negotiation frameworks had effectively collapsed, while president Vladimir Putin remained unlikely to end the war in response to sanctions or Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries and logistics networks. Up to 70 vessels are waiting near the Danube's Sulina Canal for access to Ukrainian ports to load grain for export, traders and analysts said on Wednesday, with a shortage of pilots and priority given to other cargoes creating long delays. After Russian attacks effectively blocked Ukraine's Black Sea ports, which had handled 90 per cent of the country's grain exports, some shipments were rerouted through Danube river ports, which have much lower capacity.
Grain cargoes are competing for access with higher-priority shipments such as fuel, slowing exports. Frequent air raid alerts, which force the suspension of all port operations, have added to the disruption. Ukraine is one of the world's biggest grain exporters and disruptions to its shipments can drive up global prices.
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