Russia Ukraine war latest: Trump’s vice president pick JP Vance spells disaster for Kyiv, EU official says

Donald Trump’s choice for his running mate is a “disaster” for Ukraine, a senior EU official has said.

Speaking to Politico under the condition of anonymity, the official’s comments reflected the bleak future in store for US-Ukraine support with JP Vance as the new candidate for vice president.

The 39-year-old Ohio senator has backed attempts by the US Republican Party to end support for Ukraine in its war against Russia since the invasion began.

In a speech at the National Conservatism conference, he criticised the decision to send Ukraine “hundreds of billions of dollars of weaponry with no obvious end in sight and no obvious conclusion or even objective that we are close to getting accomplished”.

U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is ready to act “immediately” as a peace broker in the Russia-Ukraine war if he is elected in November, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said in a letter to EU leaders.

The letter, addressed to European Council President Charles Michel and shared with all EU leaders, was drafted after Orban held talks with Trump as well as with the leaders of Ukraine, Russia and China.

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

A court in Moscow on Monday ordered house arrest for a general in custody on fraud charges, in a ruling that represents an about-face from just weeks ago, when the same court refused to release the general from jail.

Maj. Gen. Ivan Popov was ordered to be placed under house arrest until at least Oct. 11 by the 235th Garrison Military Court.

Popov, who had commanded the 58th Guards Combined Arms Army, was arrested in May along with several top military officials, including former Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov, a close associate of then Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. Some of these officials have been charged with bribery, while Popov has faced charges of fraud on an exceptionally large scale.

Volodymyr Zelensky said “unwavering faith in victory and a just peace for Ukraine is very important” in a post on X after visiting the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra on Monday.

Ukrainian attacks caused a fire at a factory producing electrical devices and wounded at least six people in Russian areas bordering Ukraine overnight, local governors said on Tuesday.

None of the workers were injured in the drone attack on factory in the town of Korenevo in Russia‘s Kursk region, but one person was wounded when a drone dropped an explosive device on a private household elsewhere in the region, interim governor Alexei Smirnov said.

There was no immediate comment from Ukrainian authorities on the reported attacks which Reuters could not confirm independently.

Russia‘s Defence Ministry said air defence systems destroyed 13 Ukrainian drones overnight, including one drone over the Kursk region.

Vyacheslav Gladkov, the governor of the border region of Belgorod, said four people were wounded by Ukrainian shelling. In the Voronezh region, one person was wounded in a drone attack, local governor Alexander Gusev said.

Russia‘s Kommersant daily newspaper reported on Tuesday that authorities were considering evacuating people from 14 villages in the Belgorod region that were particularly close to the Ukrainian border.

An unidentified individual threw a grenade at a military draft office in the western Ukrainian town of Busk overnight, causing an explosion but not hurting anyone, police said on Monday.

The police said in a statement they were investigating the incident, which comes as Ukraine is stepping up its effort to draft civilians into the armed forces more than 28 months since Russia invaded.

Police in the western Lviv region said the explosion damaged the facade of the draft office and its windows. The individual had fled after throwing the grenade, they said.

There have been persistent cases of men fleeing Ukraine to avoid military service throughout the war. In recent months there have also been Ukrainian media reports of violence directed at draft offices and draft officers.

Asked if they were concerned, Ukraine‘s military told Reuters that maintaining public trust was an “important component of the activities of the (armed forces), without which it will be extremely difficult to achieve victory over the enemy.” (

Seeing the military patrol handing out call-up papers on the outskirts of Kyiv, one man slipped into a nearby store. Another refused to even stop for the officers. Others, however, quietly obliged.

While men may be coming round to Ukraine’s ramped-up mobilisation drive to replenish troop numbers more than 28 months since Russia’s invasion, they are less eager to fight than before, said a draft officer, who uses the call sign “Fantomas”.

“Now, as far as I know, most of the queues [at draft offices] are people who want to obtain some sort of exemption [from fighting],” said the 36-year-old, who was accompanied by Reuters on a recent draft patrol in the Ukrainian capital.

The combat veteran is on the frontlines of the effort to redouble the draft despite waning public enthusiasm for wartime service as military analysts describe regenerating troop manpower as one of Kyiv’s central battlefield challenges.

A bipartisan US congressional committee urged the White House to disclose details on whether Russia was sharing insight with China on how to defeat US weapons used on the battlefield in Ukraine.

In a letter to White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, the House of Representative’s select committee on China warned that Russia’s battlefield adaptations to undermine certain US weapon systems are “likely to proliferate” to China, including Russian electronic warfare countermeasures to US precision munitions.

“We should anticipate and indeed operate under the assumption that Russia is passing information about vulnerabilities or counters to American and allied weapons systems to the PRC (People’s Republic of China),” the committee’s Republican chair John Moolenaar and ranking Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi wrote.

The lawmakers cited media and think tank reports about China’s support for Russia’s military industries and the “alarming levels of Russian adaptation” that have undermined the effectiveness of several unspecified US weapons systems.

They asked Mr Sullivan to assess Russia’s ability to mitigate and counter US weapons deployed in Ukraine, and the extent to which Moscow had shared “lessons learned” with China, as well as any Chinese military efforts to mirror Russian military innovations.

Treason cases were rare in Russia 30 years ago, with only a handful brought annually. In the past decade and especially since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, however, the number has soared, along with espionage prosecutions.

They are ensnaring citizens and foreigners alike. Recent victims range from Kremlin critics and independent journalists to veteran scientists working with countries that Moscow considers friendly.

One rights group counted over 100 known treason cases in 2023, with probably another 100 that nobody knows about.