Russian President Vladimir Putin will travel to Beijing on May 19–20 for a two-day summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, according to CBS News. Said former U.S. Trade Representative negotiator Wendy Cutler: "So far, it doesn't seem like Trump and his team have a lot to show for the visit" — a reference to Trump's own China summit, which concluded less than 24 hours before the Kremlin announced Putin's trip.
Russian President Vladimir Putin will travel to Beijing on May 19-20 for talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, according to Bloomberg Politics. The visit follows Xi's summit with President Trump in the Chinese capital by only days, positioning the Putin-Xi meeting as a direct sequel to the U.S.-China talks.
Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Jeanne Shaheen called on the Trump administration to allow a sanctions waiver covering purchases of Russian oil to lapse at its scheduled expiration just after midnight Saturday, according to The Hill. Said Shaheen: "Tonight, when the current license for Russian oil expires, it should not be renewed."
Turkey has proposed constructing a $1.2 billion fuel pipeline to supply military energy needs for NATO allies along the alliance's eastern European flank, according to Bloomberg Politics. The project would cost approximately €1 billion and is intended to strengthen energy resilience for member states most exposed to supply disruptions from Russia.
Finnish President Alexander Stubb argued that the United States has too much at stake in Europe to leave NATO, and that its own strategic interests will keep it engaged on the continent, according to Bloomberg Politics. Said Stubb: "The US needs NATO to counter Russian nukes."
Russian President Vladimir Putin is scheduled to visit Beijing on May 20, days after President Xi Jinping hosts Donald Trump for a summit in the Chinese capital, according to the South China Morning Post.
Russia is recruiting students at a leading engineering university with an offer of more than 5 million rubles ($68,275) and free tuition upon return in exchange for leaving their studies for a year to serve as military drone pilots, according to Bloomberg Politics.
President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping completed the first day of a summit in Beijing, according to CBS News. The same day, Russia launched a large-scale aerial assault on Kyiv.
A Russian disinformation operation known as Storm-1516 is using AI-generated fakes to target American voters ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, according to Bloomberg Politics. Said investigative reporter Stephanie Baker: weakened social media guardrails have made the operation more effective and harder to counter.
Hungary summoned the Russian ambassador to protest recent attacks on Ukraine, marking a sharp departure from Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's 16-year alignment with Moscow, according to Bloomberg Politics. The move is the most direct diplomatic rebuke Budapest has directed at Russia since Orbán took power.
Russian military blogger Yuri Kotenok, writing on his pro-invasion Telegram channel, reported in April 2026 that along parts of the front line there are "categorically, physically no people," attributing the breakdown to a command culture he called "krugovoe vran'ye" — circular lying — in which officers advance careers through false reports rather than results, according to War on the Rocks. Said Kotenok: "The military situation is only getting worse, especially compared to '22 and '23. Everyone sees it, everyone understands it, and everyone stays silent."
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia plans to deploy its nuclear-capable Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile before the end of the year, following a test the Kremlin described as successful, according to Bloomberg Politics. The Sarmat, NATO-designated SS-X-30 Satan II, is designed to carry multiple independently targetable warheads and has been central to Russian nuclear modernization messaging since at least 2018.
Only one Russian crude cargo loaded at the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk last week, pushing overall Russian oil export volumes lower, according to Bloomberg Politics. Drone alerts and storm disruptions curtailed activity at the port, which serves as a primary outlet for Russian crude bound for global markets.
Russian President Vladimir Putin told reporters he believes the war in Ukraine is "coming to an end" and said he is open to discussions with European parties, according to Reuters. Said Putin: "I believe that the matter is coming to an end."
Russian President Vladimir Putin told reporters Saturday that he believes the war he launched in Ukraine more than four years ago is coming to an end, according to NBC News. The statement came during a three-day ceasefire brokered by President Trump, with Russian and Ukrainian forces currently observing the pause in active hostilities.
RealClearPolitics reports that the Trump administration is effectively ceding management of Ukraine's future to European partners — pulling back American ownership of the war's diplomatic endgame and leaving the continent to hold whatever ceasefire architecture emerges.
The strategic read is bleak for Kyiv: Europe is fractious, slow, and still dependent on U.S. logistics and intelligence. The question the outlet poses is whether a divided European bloc can simultaneously sustain military pressure on Russia, negotiate a credible peace, and push democratic reform inside a Ukraine still plagued by oligarchic capture.
Who benefits immediately: Putin, who has consistently bet that Western unity dissolves under sustained pressure. Who gets the bill: European taxpayers and Ukrainian civilians. Trump walks away from a war he couldn't win and couldn't end — and calls it a handoff.
Russian President Vladimir Putin held his annual Victory Day parade on Moscow's Red Square Saturday — celebrating the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany — as a Trump-announced three-day ceasefire with Ukraine briefly quieted the front lines, Bloomberg Politics reports. The Kremlin had imposed intensified security measures ahead of the event in response to escalating Ukrainian drone attacks.
Read the play: Putin gets his parade, his symbolism, and a ceasefire he didn't negotiate — announced instead by the American president. That sequencing matters. Trump absorbs the diplomatic cost of pressuring Ukraine to stand down; Putin absorbs the optics win.
A three-day pause is not a peace process. It's a photo backdrop. The side that walks away from this weekend looking like a statesman — and it isn't Zelensky — is the side that controlled the calendar.
President Trump announced a three-day ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine spanning May 9–11, Bloomberg Politics reported Thursday. The dates are not incidental: May 9 is Russia's Victory Day, the Kremlin's most symbolically loaded holiday, and Moscow had been actively lobbying for exactly this pause.
Reported Bloomberg's Jeff Mason from the White House: Trump framed the announcement as a step toward peace. What it operationally delivers is an interruption-free backdrop for Putin's military parade — legitimized by American presidential imprimatur.
The strategic read is straightforward. Russia wanted a ceasefire window that served Russian domestic theater; it got one. Ukraine gets nothing durable — three days, no territorial concession from Moscow, no enforcement mechanism on record. The White House traded a concrete diplomatic asset for a photo-op alignment with a Russian national holiday. That's not dealmaking. That's capitulation dressed as initiative.
President Trump announced a three-day ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine over the weekend, along with a prisoner swap, Bloomberg Politics reported Thursday. No framework for a permanent settlement was attached to the announcement.
The strategic read is straightforward: a 72-hour pause costs Russia nothing and hands Moscow a rest, a propaganda win, and a chance to consolidate lines before fighting resumes. Ukraine gets prisoners — real value — but no security guarantees, no territory restored, no NATO pathway locked in.
Three days is not diplomacy. It's a photo op with a countdown clock. The White House gets a headline; Putin gets a breather. Watch whether Kyiv's Western backers treat this as momentum toward a real framework or quietly prepare for the ceasefire to expire without follow-on talks.
The New Yorker reports that Russia's Victory Day parade on May 9th will be stripped of its signature columns of tanks and missile launchers — too vulnerable to Ukrainian drones to risk. That is not a footnote. Every authoritarian state that has unraveled in the modern era did so preceded by exactly this kind of symbolic contraction: the regime that can no longer perform its own mythology.
Said Farida Rustamova, founder of the Russian politics newsletter Vlast: "The old rules are breaking down, and no one knows what the new ones are, or whether they exist at all." Meanwhile, DeepState's 2026 tracking shows Russia advancing at roughly half the rate it achieved in 2025 — and Ukraine has recaptured small patches of previously Russian-held territory.
The long pattern, from Louis XVI's court through the late Soviet period, is not a dramatic coup. It is a widening gap between the performance of control and its reality — until the two can no longer be reconciled.
War on the Rocks reports that since the U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran launched in February, Gulf Arab states facing daily drone strikes have been requesting help not from Washington — but from Kyiv. Ukraine is one answer to 11 countries seeking counter-drone assistance, including the United States itself, which asked despite the president's public claim that "we don't need their help in drone defense."
Said Zelenskyy, briefing reporters on Ukrainian trainers deployed to the Middle East: "Did we destroy Iranian Shaheds? Yes, we did. Did we do it in just one country? No, in several. And in my view, this is a success." Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar have signed or are concluding 10-year security agreements with Ukraine; similar talks are underway with Oman, Kuwait, and Bahrain.
The play: Ukraine possesses combat-tested counter-drone capability it can share without U.S. permission. Russia-Iran integration built this threat; Ukraine-Gulf integration is the workaround. Washington is no longer the hub — it's a node that showed up late.
War on the Rocks flags a strategic vulnerability Europe has not fully priced in: the same insurance-cascade mechanism that shut the Strait of Hormuz could be replicated against the Danish Straits, severing LNG supply to Germany, Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states. The chokepoint doesn't have to be physically blocked — it has to be made uninsurable.
The receipts are concrete. Lloyd's List counted 56 tankers transiting Hormuz on the eve of U.S.-Israeli strikes on Feb. 28; two days later, just seven remained. Tanker traffic collapsed more than 80 percent before Iran laid a single mine. The Lloyd's Joint War Committee can cancel war-risk cover within 48 hours of a zone redesignation. Russia's Alabuga facility is producing Geran-2 drones — range exceeding 1,300 km — at 3,000 units per month, with Kaliningrad's range envelope comfortably covering the Danish Straits.
The play: a handful of deniable incidents, insurance withdrawal, self-deterring shipowners. NATO patrols detect; they cannot guarantee. Underwriters don't insure guarantees they can't enforce.
Russia and Ukraine exchanged drone strikes overnight Thursday into Friday, Bloomberg Politics reported May 8, as Moscow's own unilateral ceasefire proposal — timed to this weekend's Victory Day commemoration — showed no sign of taking hold on either side.
The operative detail: the strikes continued even as the proposal was nominally still on the table. That's not a ceasefire falling apart. That's a ceasefire that was never designed to hold.
Read the play straight: a Victory Day ceasefire costs Russia nothing militarily and buys Putin a propaganda backdrop — parades, not funerals — for domestic consumption. Ukraine keeps striking because accepting the frame means legitimizing the calendar. Neither side blinked, which tells you everything about the actual state of negotiations.
Ukraine's chief negotiator Rustem Umerov arrived in the United States for meetings with Trump's envoys to restart stalled peace talks with Russia, Bloomberg Politics reports. The move is Zelenskiy's clearest signal yet that Kyiv—not Moscow—is willing to show up and do the work, handing Trump's team a choice: reward the party that's engaging, or keep offering Russia a free pass on the clock.