Joe Barnes Brussels Correspondent. 

Antonia Langford. Kieran Kelly

21 August 2025

A firefighter works at the site of a residential area hit during Russian drone and missile strikes in Lviv region, August 21 Credit: REUTERS

Donald Trump has suggested it would be “impossible” for Ukraine to win the war without attacking Russia.

The US president also criticised his predecessor, Joe Biden, for not granting Kyiv permission to “fight back”, in an ambiguous social media post.

He proceeded to share a picture of himself poking Vladimir Putin in the chest, above an image of Richard Nixon doing the same to Nikita Khrushchev, a former prime minister of the Soviet Union.

“It is very hard, if not impossible, to win a war without attacking an invaders country. It’s like a great team in sports that has a fantastic defence, but is not allowed to play offence. There is no chance of winning! It is like that with Ukraine and Russia,” Mr Trump wrote in his Truth Social website.

“Crooked and grossly incompetent Joe Biden would not let Ukraine FIGHT BACK, only DEFEND. How did that work out?”

The president’s social media musings could be interpreted as a tacit show of support for Ukraine’s recent campaign of deep strikes on Russian oil refineries. 

Similar strikes were opposed by Mr Biden, who believed they could escalated the conflict and spike international oil prices. 

Mr Trump’s language appears to mimic a question he reportedly asked Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, over whether his forces had the ability to strike Moscow during a telephone call in July, according to a readout obtained by the Telegraph.

“Volodymyr, can you hit Moscow?… Can you hit St Petersburg too?” the US president asked, the FT reported at the time.

Mr Zelensky reportedly said he would if handed the right Western weapons.

Ukraine has received donations of a number of long-range Western missiles, including Britain’s Storm Shadow and American Atacms.

However, for most of the war, the weapons were restricted to only strike targets in occupied areas of Ukraine and Crimea, the peninsula illegally annexed by the Russians in 2014.

Mr Zelensky and Ukrainian officials lobbied hard for Mr Biden to overturn those restrictions.

The former US president eventually relented to the requests, allowing strikes in small areas of Russia, on its southern border, where it was mounting new attacks into Ukraine’s Kharkiv and Sumy regions.

Ukraine has been carrying out a series of successful attacks on Russian military installations and oil infrastructure, using its own Intelligence and homemade weapons.

Kyiv is not publicly known to have received resupplies of Storm Shadow or Atacms missiles for months.

Mr Trump’s vague social media post came the same day as Associated Press published images of what it reported to be a facility storing Flamingo missiles, a Ukrainian-made weapon with a range of 3,000km.

Two of the missiles were etched with the numbers “479” and “480”, suggesting that many at least had been produced by Ukrainian engineers.

Mr Zelensky has claimed in previous social media posts that the weapon has already been tested on the battlefield.

If the cruise missile is capable of hitting a target at its touted range, Moscow would be comfortably within its limits.

Ukraine, however, would likely need Western intelligence assistance to pull off such an audacious attack against the Russian capital.

Putin ‘trying to avoid the necessity to meet’, says Zelensky

Volodymyr Zelensky has said that Russia is attempting to avoid the “necessity” of holding bilateral talks despite US-led efforts to facilitate talks between the warring countries.

“Current signals from Russia are, to be honest, indecent. They’re trying to avoid the necessity to meet. They don’t want to end this war,” Mr Zelensky said in his evening address.

Earlier this week, an agreement seemed to have been met to hold a summit between Mr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin.

However, the Kremlin has demurred, issuing vague statements which do not confirm or deny its willingness to participate.

On Thursday, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov claimed that Ukraine is “not interested” in a long-term peace deal. 

“The Ukrainian regime and its representatives comment on the current situation in a very specific way, directly showing that they are not interested in a sustainable, fair, long-term settlement,” Mr Lavrov said at a news conference.

Pictured: Ukrainian firefighters battle the aftermath of a Russian attack in Kostiantynivka

Top US, European officers work on military options for Ukraine

Top officers from the US and Europe held talks this week to work on military options for Ukraine’s security in the event that a peace deal can be brokered with Russia.

US General Dan Caine and his counterparts from the United Kingdom, Finland, France, Germany, Italy and Ukraine met on Tuesday and Wednesday in Washington, a spokesperson for the US Joint Staff said in a statement.

“They developed military options to support negotiations to bring a lasting peace to Europe,” which “will be presented to each nation’s respective national security advisors for appropriate consideration in ongoing diplomatic efforts,” according to the statement.

Details on the options being discussed were not provided.

Where could a Putin-Zelensky summit be held?

Donald Trump had initially aimed to hold a trilateral meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin as early as Aug 22.

Today, sources said that US president has decided to take a step back to allow Moscow and Kyiv to negotiate with each other directly.

Yet progress appears to have stalled on the bilateral summit, even after it was reported on Monday that Putin had agreed to meet with his Ukrainian counterpart for the first time since 2019.

One of the questions that remains open is where a possible summit could be held.

Putin reportedly suggested Moscow, a source told AFP earlier this week, a proposal that Mr Zelensky immediately rejected.

Hungary has been lobbying to host for several days now, but there are concerns that it might not be sufficiently neutral given prime minister Viktor Orban’s ties with Putin and pro-Russian views.

On Wednesday, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk quipped that it would be best not to hold talks in the Hungarian capital, Budapest, given that it was the location of a 1994 summit under which Kyiv surrendered its share of the Soviet nuclear arsenal in exchange for security guarantees from Russia.

Mr Tusk said “maybe I’m superstitious, but this time I would try to find another place.”

Switzerland and Austria have both said that they would grant immunity to the Russian president from an International Criminal Court warrant if he attended peace negotiations there, with Mr Zelensky expressing a preference for the Austrian capital.

Zelensky says he will only meet with Putin after security guarantees agreed

Volodymyr Zelensky has said that he will only meet with Vladimir Putin after his allies have agreed on security guarantees for Ukraine to deter future Russian attacks.

In comments released on Thursday, Mr Zelensky said “we want to have an understanding of the security guarantees architecture within seven to 10 days”, adding “we need to understand which country will be ready to do what at each specific moment”.

In additional remarks, Mr Zelensky said that Donald Trump wants to see a bilateral meeting between Kyiv and Moscow, but that it should be held in a “neutral” European country, ruling out a summit in the Russian capital.

The Ukrainian head of state also rejected the idea of China playing a role in guaranteeing Ukraine’s security, citing Beijing’s alleged support for Moscow.

Vance’s ‘icebreaker’ with Zelensky after Oval Office blowup

US vice president JD Vance made a joke to break the ice with Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday after their Oval Office showdown some months ago.

Speaking to Fox News, the vice president said, “So President Zelensky walked into the Oval Office. I was chatting with him, with the President, with some of the senior Ukrainian delegation. I said, ‘Mr President, so long as you behave, I won’t say anything’, and he just chuckled a little bit. It was a good little icebreaker.”