US President Donald Trump marked his 80th birthday on Sunday with separate phone calls to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin, as fighting continued on both sides of the front line and Britain announced the first detention of a suspected Russian “shadow fleet” tanker in the English Channel.
Zelensky and Trump spoke for around half an hour, discussing the ongoing war, diplomacy and peace negotiations, with Zelensky also taking the opportunity to wish Trump a happy birthday. Putin separately spoke with Trump about the invasion of Ukraine and an upcoming visit by senior US envoys to Russia. According to Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov, the conversation between Trump and Putin focused largely on the memorandum of understanding currently being drafted between the United States and Iran. “The conversation focused on the situation surrounding the memorandum of understanding being drafted between the United States and Iran. Donald Trump said an agreement is close,” Ushakov told reporters. He added that it had been agreed that US presidential special representatives Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who are closely involved in the Iran negotiations, would return to Russia “soon.”
The diplomatic exchanges came as fighting on the ground showed no sign of slowing. Oryol regional governor Andrei Klychkov said one person was killed and nine wounded when a Ukrainian drone struck a residential building overnight in the regional capital, also called Oryol, in southwestern Russia. Separately, local authorities in Russia’s Yaroslavl region, around 440 miles from the Ukrainian border, said fuel storage facilities had caught fire after being hit by a drone. Zelensky confirmed Ukrainian forces had “struck an oil facility that was important for the reserve of the aggressor state” in Yaroslavl, as part of Kyiv’s wider campaign targeting Russia’s energy infrastructure, oil and gas facilities that Ukraine argues directly fund and sustain Moscow’s invasion, now in its fifth year.
Separately, Britain announced it was investigating a sanctioned tanker suspected of forming part of Russia’s “shadow fleet,” used to ship oil in violation of international sanctions imposed over the war. British armed forces boarded and detained the vessel, named the Smyrtos, in the English Channel on Sunday, in what the Ministry of Defence described as “the first UK-led operation of its kind.” Russia is believed to operate a fleet of hundreds of such ships in an effort to circumvent sanctions. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said: “This operation delivers yet another blow to Russia and reminds those fuelling Putin’s war in Ukraine that they cannot hide.”
