Ukraine ‘determined’ to maintain US ties after aid halt

MOSCOW: Russia said Wednesday it wanted new talks with Ukraine in Istanbul next Monday to present its plan for a peace settlement, but Kyiv said it needed to see the plan in advance for the meeting to yield results.
Diplomatic efforts to end the three-year conflict have accelerated in recent months, but Moscow has repeatedly rejected calls for an unconditional ceasefire and shown no signs of scaling back its maximalist demands.
The two sides previously met in Istanbul on May 16, their first direct talks in over three years. That encounter failed to yield a breakthrough.
US President Donald Trump, who has been pushing for a peace deal, has become increasingly frustrated with Moscow’s apparent stalling and warned Wednesday he would determine within “about two weeks” whether Vladimir Putin was serious about ending the fighting.
Ukraine said it had already submitted its peace terms to Russia and demanded Moscow do the same.
“We are not opposed to further meetings with the Russians and are awaiting their memorandum,” Ukrainian defense minister Rustem Umerov, who negotiated for Kyiv at the last talks, said in a post on X.
“The Russian side has at least four more days before their departure to provide us with their document for review. Diplomacy must be substantive, and the next meeting must yield results.”
Moscow’s offensive, launched in February 2022, has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and the destruction of large parts of eastern and southern Ukraine.
The Russian army now controls around a fifth of Ukraine’s territory, including the Crimean peninsula, which it annexed in 2014.
Russia said it would present a “memorandum” outlining its peace terms at the talks next Monday, and that its foreign minister Sergei Lavrov had briefed US counterpart Marco Rubio on the proposal.
“Our delegation, led by Vladimir Medinsky, is ready to present a memorandum to the Ukrainian delegation and provide the necessary explanations during a second round of direct talks in Istanbul on Monday, June 2,” Lavrov said in a video statement.
Medinsky, a Russian political scientist and former culture minister, led Russia’s negotiating team during a first round of talks in Istanbul on May 16.
The two sides have traded waves of massive aerial attacks in recent weeks, with Ukraine unleashing one of its largest-ever drone barrages on Russia overnight and Moscow pounding Ukraine with deadly strikes over the weekend.
Trump told reporters on Wednesday he was “very disappointed” at Russia’s deadly bombardment during the negotiating process, but rebuffed calls to impose more sanctions on Moscow.
“If I think I’m close to getting a deal, I don’t want to screw it up by doing that,” he said.
The Kremlin earlier rejected a call by Ukrainian President Zelensky for a three-way summit with Trump and Putin.
Moscow said any meeting involving Russian President Putin and Zelensky would only happen after “concrete agreements” had been struck between negotiators from each side.
In exchange for peace, the Kremlin has demanded Ukraine abandon its ambition of joining NATO as well as cede territory it already controls — a proposition that Ukraine has called unacceptable.
Talks between the two sides in Istanbul earlier this month yielded a 1,000-for-1,000 prisoner exchange and the two sides agreed to work on respective peace proposals.
But Russia has kept up its deadly strikes on Ukraine in the meantime while rejecting calls for a ceasefire.
Zelensky on Wednesday accused Russia of dragging out the peace process and of not wanting to halt its offensive.
“They will constantly look for reasons not to end the war,” he said at a press conference in Berlin alongside German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
On the battlefield, Zelensky said Russia was “amassing” more than 50,000 troops on the front line around the northeastern Sumy border region, where Moscow’s army has captured a number of settlements as it seeks to establish what Putin has called a “buffer zone” inside Ukrainian territory.

NEW YORK: A US judge said on Wednesday the Trump administration’s bid to deport Columbia University student and pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil is likely unconstitutional.
US District Judge Michael Farbiarz in Newark, New Jersey said he will issue a further order with next steps later on Wednesday. Khalil is currently in immigration detention in Louisiana.
Khalil was arrested on March 8 after the State Department revoked his green card under a little-used provision of US immigration law granting the US secretary of state the power to seek the deportation of any non-citizen whose presence in the country is deemed adverse to US foreign policy interests.
Khalil and his supporters say his arrest and attempted deportation are violations of his right to freedom of speech under the US Constitution’s First Amendment.
Farbiarz wrote that he would not rule for now on whether Khalil’s First Amendment rights were violated. But he said Khalil was likely to succeed in his argument that the legal provision invoked by the Trump administration is so vague as to be unconstitutional.
The judge wrote that it was unlikely that an “ordinary person” would know that the law “could be used against him based on his speech inside the United States, however odious it might allegedly have been.”
Lawyers for Khalil and spokespeople for the White House, the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Khalil was the first known foreign student to be arrested as part of President Donald Trump’s bid to deport foreign students who took part in pro-Palestinian protests that swept US college campuses after Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent military assault.
Civil rights groups argue that Trump’s administration unlawfully detained the 30-year-old public policy student in retaliation for his criticism of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
The Hamas attack killed 1,195 people, according to Israeli tallies, and Israel’s military campaign has killed more than 54,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza health ministry.
Khalil, a Palestinian who was born and raised in a refugee camp in Syria, entered the US on a student visa in 2022 and became a lawful permanent resident last year through his wife Noor Abdalla, an American citizen.
Federal judges in recent weeks have ordered another Palestinian Columbia student, Mohsen Mahdawi, and a Turkish student at Tufts University in Massachusetts, Rumeysa Ozturk, to be released from immigration detention while they challenge the government’s efforts to deport them.