KYIV — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke to American President-elect Donald Trump earlier this week after the U.S. election results came in. In a surprising development, they were joined on the line by tech billionaire Elon Musk, signaling the tycoon’s potential foreign policy influence in a new Trump administration. “Yes, at some point Trump passed the phone to Musk. No, nothing unusual, they had a normal conversation,” a Ukrainian official close to Zelenskyy told POLITICO. “President [Zelenskyy] just thanked Musk for Starlinks,” he added, referring to Musk’s satellite internet system. Musk’s involvement in the conversation, which took place as Russia maintains…
Author: Veronika Melkozerova
KYIV — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed Wednesday that he asked the United States for Tomahawk long-range missiles to help defeat Russia — and slammed the White House for leaking secrets to the American media. The Tomahawks can fly up to 1,500 kilometers and would allow Ukraine to strike targets deep inside Russia if permitted by the U.S., which is a key part of Kyiv’s so-called Victory Plan for beating back Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Zelenskyy, though, was displeased with information about the Tomahawk request being divulged to The New York Times for a story in which an anonymous senior…
KYIV — Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin resigned on Tuesday in the wake of a lurid scandal in which public officials allegedly used bogus disability certificates to get more generous pensions from the state and possibly evade being drafted to fight Russian troops. In Khmelnytskyi region in western Ukraine, for example, some 50 prosecutors reportedly obtained fraudulent disability certificates from an official with the state medical board, shielding them from induction into the country’s hard-pressed military. The official was arrested and charged with corruption — the draft-evasion scheme allegedly earned her hundreds of thousands of dollars. After Ukrainian media broke…
Russian air defenses shot down 10 drones over Moscow and its outskirts, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said in a Telegram post early Wednesday morning. “The echeloned defense of Moscow against enemy UAVs made it possible to repel all attacks. This was one of the largest attempts to attack Moscow with the help of drones of all time,” Sobyanin added. Overall, 45 drones attacked different regions of Russia overnight, with 11 shot down over the Moscow region, 23 destroyed over the Bryansk region, six over Belgorod, three over the Kaluga region and two over Kursk, Russia’s defense ministry said in a statement,…