Russia Ukraine war latest: Putin’s forces claim capture of strategic town as Zelensky makes demand for Trump peace talks

Keith Kellogg, Mr Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, says the administration’s new goal is to stop the fighting in 100 days.

But details on how this will be achieved remain scant. Mr Trump has repeatedly claimed this is because speaking openly about his plans would undermine his negotiating position. His detractors, however, say this is a cover for a lack of plan.

Below, The Independent looks at the factors at play and why a peace deal could prove elusive.

Moscow has presented a new school textbook that compares Russia’s war in Ukraine to the Soviet struggle against the Nazis and says Russia was “forced” to send troops into Ukraine.

The three-volume “Military History of Russia” was edited by Vladimir Medinsky, an aide to Mr Putin who headed a delegation that held unsuccessful peace talks with Ukraine in 2022, in the early months of the war, and has already co-authored Russia’s main history textbook.

The third volume, likely to be dismissed by Ukraine’s leadership as propaganda, is designed to be taught to children aged 15 and older.

In a chapter entitled “Professionalism, indomitability and courage: Russian troops in the Special Military Operation”, the book tells schoolchildren that Russia was “forced” to send its troops into Ukraine in 2022.

It says the West had for years ignored Russia’s security concerns – a reference to the eastward expansion of the Nato military alliance, and to what the book described as the Western-backed toppling of a Russia-friendly Ukrainian president in 2014, which had turned Ukraine into an “aggressive anti-Russian bridgehead”.

Nato and Ukraine deny ever posing a threat to Russia.

The book also purportedly claims to explain why the Kremlin believes the war started and how it is being fought, highlights what it regards as incidences of battlefield heroism, and describes how the modern Russian army is sometimes employing techniques used by the Soviet army during the Second World War.

Volodymyr Zelensky defended mobilisation of Ukrainians fighting in the war against Russia, stating that if the army goes back home then Vladimir Putin “will kill us all”.

“The wartime situation calls for mobilisation of people and all the resources we have in the country. Absolutely all of them,” Mr Zelensky said in the interview, excerpts of which were posted on the president’s Telegram channel.

“And, unfortunately, that is the challenge of this war and that is why we have to speed things up to the maximum to end it, to oblige Russia to end this war,” he said.

“Today, we are defending ourselves. If tomorrow, for instance, half the army heads home, we really should have surrendered on the very first day. That is how it is. If half the army goes home, Putin will kill us all.”

Ukraine approved legislation last year lowering the age of mobilisation for Ukrainian men from 27 to 25 years, narrowing exemptions and imposing penalties on evaders.

An overnight Russian air attack set a private business on fire in Kharkiv, said the mayor of the city in northeastern Ukraine.

“There is a large-scale fire,” mayor Ihor Terekhov said. “All emergency services are on site. There is no information about potential casualties at this time,” he said on his Telegram channel.

Kharkiv city has been under intermittent Russian fire since the start of the war and has been the scene of some of the hottest clashes on the frontline.

Russian forces are closing in on the strategically important eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk after capturing a string of villages to its south, and Ukraine has halted production at its only coking coal mine nearby due to the advance.

Pokrovsk is a road and rail hub in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, which had a pre-war population of some 60,000 people. While most people have fled, Ukraine estimated last month that up to 11,000 still remain in the city.

It lies on a key road used by the Ukrainian military to supply other embattled eastern outposts including the towns of Chasiv Yar and Kostiantynivka in the Donetsk region.

Ukraine’s only mine that produces coking coal – used in its once vast steel industry and vital for the country’s pre-war economy – is just a 20-minute drive to the west of Pokrovsk, and open source data shows Russian forces are less than 2 km (1.24 miles) from one of the mine shafts.

Moscow says it has annexed Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region and sees taking control of Pokrovsk as an important stepping stone to incorporating the entire region into Russia. Kyiv and the West reject Russia’s territorial claims as illegal and accuse Moscow of prosecuting a war of colonial conquest.

Control of the city, which the Russian media call “the gateway to Donetsk”, would allow Moscow to severely disrupt Ukrainian supply lines along the eastern front and boost its campaign to capture Chasiv Yar, which sits on higher ground offering potential control of a wider area.

Squeezing the Ukrainian military’s access to the road network in the vicinity would make it harder for Kyiv’s troops to hold pockets of territory either side of Pokrovsk, which could allow Russia to advance the front line.