Russia Ukraine news live: Germany to slash military aid for Kyiv in deepening crisis for Zelensky

Ukraine and Russia have carried out one of their largest prisoner exchanges of the war – 190 people in total –following negotiations mediated by the United Arab Emirates.

Ukrainian prisoners of war (PoWs) were filmed arriving in coaches at an undisclosed location in Ukraine on Wednesday, before being draped in national flags and chanting “Glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes”.

Footage released by Ukraine’s commission for human rights also showed multiple soldiers holding emotional phone calls with their families, the first time they had spoken to relatives since being captured, while another man was pictured in tears collapsing onto the ground.

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations told Russia’s foreign minister on Tuesday that President Vladimir Putin should release detained Americans, singling out journalist Evan Gershkovich and ex-Marine Paul Whelan, and accused the Russian leader of treating “human beings as bargaining chips.”

Linda Thomas-Greenfield took the opportunity of Moscow’s top diplomat, Sergey Lavrov, presiding at a U.N. Security Council meeting to promote multilateralism and democracy to appeal for the release of Americans.

Arrests of Americans are increasingly common in Russia, with nine U.S. citizens known to be currently detained there as tensions between the two countries have escalated, especially since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

After almost 30 months of war with Russia, Ukraine’s difficulties on the battlefield are mounting even as its vital support from the United States is increasingly at the mercy of changing political winds.

A six-month delay in military assistance from the U.S., the biggest single contributor to Ukraine, opened the door for the Kremlin’s forces to push on the front line. Ukrainian troops are now fighting to check the slow but gradual gains by Russia’s bigger and better-equipped army.

“The next two or three months are going to be probably the hardest this year for Ukraine,” military analyst Michael Kofman of the Carnegie Endowment said in a recent podcast.

German Finance Minister Christian Lindner said Ukraine‘s financing is secured “for the foreseeable future” thanks to a Group of Seven plan to use proceeds from frozen Russian assets to give the country $50 billion in loans.

The Conservative ex-premier was in Washington this week to attend the Republican National Conference in Milwaukee, where Mr Trump was named the party’s official candidate in the upcoming US presidential elections.

After a photograph circulated showing him giving a speech to a near-empty room at the conference on Tuesday, Mr Johnson later shared an image of himself meeting with Mr Trump, just days after the ex-president survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania.

Donald Trump will push for peace over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “immediately” if he is elected for a second term in the White House, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban has claimed in a letter to European Union leaders.

“I can … surely state that shortly after his election victory, he will not wait until his inauguration, [Mr Trump] will be ready to act as a peace broker immediately. He has detailed and well-founded plans for this,” Mr Orban wrote.

Russia and Ukraine have exchanged 95 prisoners of war from each side after the United Arab Emirates acted as an intermediary, the Russian Defence Ministry said on Wednesday.

Russia‘s Defence Ministry, in a statement on the Telegram messaging app, said the returning Russian soldiers would undergo medical examinations in Moscow.

The ministry noted the UAE’s “humanitarian mediation.”

The electricity grid operators of the three Baltic countries on Tuesday officially notified Russia and Belarus that they will exit a 2001 agreement that has kept Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania connected to an electricity transmission system controlled by Moscow.

The Baltic countries already have stopped buying electricity from Russia. And in a plan announced last year as part of moves to sever ties with Moscow following its invasion of Ukraine, the countries will shift their grid connections next February to the main continental European energy network in a move to end reliance.

Utility operators Elering of Estonia, AST of Latvia and Litgrid of Lithuania said that the exit notice was signed in the Latvian capital of Riga on Tuesday. The joint agreement with Moscow and Minsk will end Feb. 7, and the Baltic systems will be disconnected from the grid the next day.

Switzerland has opened investigations into more than 50 cases of possible sanctions violations and has found breaches in 15 of them so far, the government said in a statement on Wednesday.

Since Russia‘s invasion of Ukraine, Switzerland has adopted sanctions similar to those of other Western countries, passing new measures earlier this month.

The State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) said in an email to Reuters that the effective implementation of sanctions was a government priority and that it had opened 56 violations proceedings to date.

Of those, around half have been dropped and penalties have been ordered for 15 of them. The others remain under investigation, it said.

SECO did not name the sectors involved, nor the individual companies subject to investigation.

Switzerland said earlier this year it had set up a specialist team to investigate and enforce sanctions that Bern imposed following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

Russia’s foreign minister accused the United States on Tuesday of holding the entire West “at gunpoint” and impeding international cooperation, a claim the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations denounced as “hypocrisy” by a country that invaded neighboring Ukraine.

The finger-pointing came at Russia ’s showcase event during its presidency of the U.N. Security Council this month, and it chose the topic — “Multilateral cooperation for a more just, democratic and sustainable world order.” Russia’s top diplomat, Sergey Lavrov, flew in from Moscow to preside.

Just before the meeting, Ukraine’s U.N. Ambassador, Sergiy Kyslytsya, read a statement on behalf of about 50 countries, including the United States, whose ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield was among the several dozen U.N. envoys surrounding him.