Zelensky to press Trump on air defences while in Washington

Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky is due to hold important talks with US President Donald Trump at the White House, where he is hoping to firm up commitments to bolstering Kyiv’s anti-ballistic missile defences.

Zelensky has arrived in the US at a significant stage in Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine, with Moscow’s mayor saying the capital was targeted by 390 drones in a matter of hours overnight.

The Ukrainian leader is expected to press Trump over support he gave earlier this month for Kyiv to be given a licence to produce Patriot interceptor missiles.

Russia has escalated deadly ballistic missile attacks on Ukraine’s capital recently, and Zelensky has said interceptors are urgently needed.

Patriot missiles have been at the top of Zelensky’s wish-list for some time, but after the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, these US air defence interceptors are in very short supply.

Promising a licence is one thing, but co-producing the highly sophisticated PAC-2 and PAC-3 interceptors on Ukrainian soil is another, because it involves a lengthy political, legal and technical process.

A delegation from US manufacturer Raytheon visited Kyiv last week and Zelensky said the defence firm had expressed “readiness to take our partnership to an even higher level”.

After he speaks with Zelensky, Trump will have another important meeting – with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. It is the first time the two have met in person since the war on Iran started in late February.

Zelensky and Netanyahu are in Washington to attend the funeral of Senator Lindsey Graham, who died this month aged 71.

The Ukraine war appeared to coincide with the US-Israel war with Iran at the weekend, when Ukrainian forces targeted an Iranian cargo ship in the Caspian Sea.

Kyiv has described Iran as a “direct accomplice to Russian aggression against Ukraine” and Zelensky has said Ukrainian intelligence has evidence that Russia has shared satellite imagery with Tehran, enabling Iran to attack US military facilities and Gulf states.

Trump has said he will “find out if that’s true. I’ll ask Putin about it”, while saying if true, it had no impact at all.

Meanwhile, in Moscow, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said more than 390 Ukrainian drones had targeted the region between 20:30 on Monday and 06:30 on Tuesday local time, and that most had been intercepted by air defences.

Footage confirmed by BBC Verify showed damage to a high-rise building in Chekhov, south of the capital and a fire at a warehouse in Berezhki to the west. Local officials in Chekhov said there had been no casualties.

Since Zelensky last spoke to Trump in early July, Ukraine has repeatedly targeted logistics hubs, many belonging to Russian e-commerce company Wildberries, exacerbating issues faced by small and medium-sized business in parts of Russia.

Speaking at the Kremlin on Monday, President Vladimir Putin told members of Russia’s parliament, the Duma, that their country’s enemies were resorting to “terrorist methods” against civilians but would “never break” the Russian people.

“We will achieve our objectives and will together do everything for victory, for Russia,” Putin said.

At the weekend, he was confronted over the war’s objectives by an ally, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, who said the roots of the war were “not understandable”.

Tokayev said a peace deal with Ukraine could be reached if the war was halted for negotiations to take place.

“Perhaps it is time to freeze this conflict and return to the Istanbul formula 2.0,” Toyakev suggested, referring to talks that began shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday that freezing the war now was impossible “given Kyiv’s position