Ukraine received at least 20 bodies of Russian soldiers in recent exchanges, Zelenskyy says
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine's president said that Russia repatriated at least 20 of its own dead soldiers in recent exchanges with Ukraine, describing it as a result of Moscow's disorganization in carrying out large swaps of wounded POWs and remains of troops.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that an Israeli citizen was among the dead Ukraine had received in recent exchanges. He spoke to journalists on Friday but his comments were embargoed until Saturday. Officials did not disclose the identities of the bodies.
'They threw the corpses of their citizens at us. This is their attitude toward war, toward their soldiers. And this is already documented. Sometimes these bodies even have Russian passports,' he said.
He said the Russian side insisted the dead were all Ukrainians.
Journalists were shown a Russian passport and ID belonging to one of the 20 dead Russians. According to the document, the man came from the Moscow region.
Zelenskyy doubts Putin wants peace
The exchanges of the dead and wounded soldiers are the only tangible result of direct peace talks in Istanbul. In June, Ukraine and Russia agreed to exchange the bodies of fallen soldiers in a 6,000-for-6,000 format during the second round of negotiations. Ukraine was concerned that the number was too high and that the sides did not have enough time for forensic examinations and checking the identities of the dead.
Zelenskyy said he suspected Russia's plan was to play along with peace talks to appease the U.S. and stave off more sanctions but without ending the war that Russian President Vladimir Putin believes he is winning.
He said that because of this, Ukraine would be 'in a really difficult situation' of deciding whether to continue the talks in Istanbul.
Impact of Iran-Israel war on Ukraine
Zelenskyy said Ukraine was against Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, because of its military partnership with Russia, but stopped short of expressing explicit support for Israel's strikes. He repeated that the new war in the Middle East will affect Ukraine indirectly.
'Iran gave the Russians everything to kill us. They gave them martyrs, they gave them missiles, and they gave them licenses. The fact that their production capacities have now become weaker is (a) positive for us. But at certain points it may already be too late,' he said, also citing Russia's military cooperation with North Korea.
Russia has modified Iran-made Shahed drones and has used them, often hundreds at a time, in barrages targeting Ukraine.
Zelenskyy said 39 Russian companies were involved in the production of Oreshnik, an intermediate-range ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. He said 21 of them are not under sanctions. 'And therefore it is absolutely incomprehensible why sanctions should not be imposed urgently,' he said.
Russia attacked Ukraine with the missile in November, marking a serious escalation in the war and Russia's capabilities.
Ukraine looks to Europe to boost domestic weapons
Zelenskyy dispelled reports that Patriots air defense systems were destroyed in recent Russian drone and missile barrages. He also said Ukraine has started using domestically produced interceptors to shoot down Shahed drones and is seeking financing from Germany to ramp up the weapon's production.
He added he sent signals to Western partners asking them to give up 0.25% of their GDP to support Ukraine's local defense industry.
Zelenskyy said it's likely he would attend a NATO summit later this week, but that he would make a final decision on Monday.
Though Zelenskyy did not meet Trump who had left early the Group of Seven summit in Canada last week, Ukraine's Economy Minister Yulia Svyrydenko and the head of the president's office, Andriy Yermak, gave U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent a list of weapons Ukraine is hoping to purchase. 'We will wait feedback,' Zelenskyy said, adding the package of weapons included Patriot systems.
The weapons package would be among the topics Zelenskyy plans to discuss with Trump in their next meeting, he added, as well as the issue of sanctions.
'Frankly, it seems to me that we need to talk about a new breath in the diplomatic track,' he said. 'We need greater certainty and greater pressure from the world on Putin.'
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Fox News
29 minutes ago
- Fox News
Trump earns bipartisan praise for decisive action against Iran's nuclear program
Exuberant Republicans, and at least one prominent Democrat, lauded President Donald Trump's leadership on Saturday after the U.S. completed an attack on three Iranian nuclear sites. "Good. This was the right call. The regime deserves it. Well done, President @realDonaldTrump," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., wrote on X. Democratic Sen. John Fetterman, D-Penn., also said Trump made the right call. "As I've long maintained, this was the correct move by @POTUS," he said on X. "Iran is the world's leading sponsor of terrorism and cannot have nuclear capabilities. I'm grateful for and salute the finest military in the world." Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, wrote: "'Peace through strength' means ensuring our existential enemies don't acquire the most lethal and catastrophic weapons known to man." And former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz called Trump a "peacemaker." "President Trump basically wants this to be like the Solimani strike - one and done. No regime change war. Trump the Peacemaker!" he wrote on X. Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that the president "made the correct decision to strike Iran's nuclear sites. Iran made the choice to continue its pursuit of a nuclear weapon and would only be stopped by force. It would be a grave mistake to retaliate against our forces." Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said on X, "Iran has waged a war of terror against the United States for 46 years. We could never allow Iran to get nuclear weapons. God bless our brave troops. President Trump made the right call and the ayatollahs should recall his warning not to target Americans." Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, said Trump's decision was the "right one. The greatest threat to the safety of the United States and the world is Iran with a nuclear weapon. God Bless our troops." House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., wrote on X that the U.S. "military operations in Iran should serve as a clear reminder to our adversaries and allies that President Trump means what he says." Johnson said that the president gave Iran "every opportunity to make a deal, but Iran refused to commit to a nuclear disarmament agreement. President Trump has been consistent and clear that a nuclear-armed Iran will not be tolerated. That posture has now been enforced with strength, precision, and clarity." He added that Trump's "decisive action prevents the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism, which chants 'Death to America,' from obtaining the most lethal weapon on the planet." However, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who authored a war powers resolution to prevent the U.S. from getting involved in Iran said the attacks were "not constitutional." Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, echoed Massie's sentiments. "Trump struck Iran without any authorization of Congress. We need to immediately return to DC and vote on @RepThomasMassie and my War Powers Resolution to prevent America from being dragged into another endless Middle East war," he wrote on X.
CNN
31 minutes ago
- CNN
The Trump administration briefed top Republicans on Iran strikes, but kept Democrats in the dark
President Donald Trump and his team were in contact with top congressional Republicans before his strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, but top Democrats were not told of his plans until after the bombs had dropped, according to multiple people familiar with the plans. The top two Republicans in Congress, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, were both notified of the US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities ahead of time, according to multiple GOP sources. But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries received notifications shortly before the public announcement – and after the attack itself, people familiar with the notifications said. Sen. Mark Warner and Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrats on the Senate and House intelligence committees, were similarly not told until after the strikes had occurred, sources said. Reaction to the strikes has so far broken along predictable partisan lines. Republicans in Congress overwhelmingly lined up behind the president after the surprise strikes as most Democrats swiftly condemned his decision to launch them without congressional approval and demanded classified briefings. Johnson and Thune both made clear within minutes that they would stand by Trump, followed by dozens of GOP lawmakers who posted their support. 'Leaders in Congress were aware of the urgency of this situation and the Commander-in-Chief evaluated that the imminent danger outweighed the time it would take for Congress to act,' Johnson wrote on X, defending Trump's decision to move unilaterally. 'The President fully respects the Article I power of Congress, and tonight's necessary, limited, and targeted strike follows the history and tradition of similar military actions under presidents of both parties.' As of Saturday night, only three GOP lawmakers were publicly skeptical of Trump's move — including one, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who was already expected to force a full vote in the House next week on whether to restrict Trump's war powers. The president's airstrikes on Saturday night will now supercharge an already-tense debate in Congress over the limits of his war powers, with both the House and Senate expected to take votes in the coming days. Warner railed on the Trump administration's decision to strike Iran, 'without consulting Congress, without a clear strategy, without regard to the consistent conclusions of the intelligence community, and without explaining to the American people what's at stake.' 'The American people deserve more than vague rhetoric and unilateral decisions that could set off a wider war. The president must come before Congress immediately to articulate clear strategic objectives and lay out how he plans to protect American lives and ensure we are not once again drawn into a costly, unnecessary, and avoidable conflict,' Warner said. His fellow Virginia Democrat, Sen. Tim Kaine, confirmed that he still plans to force a full Senate vote asserting Congress' role, after initially introducing the resolution last week requiring Trump to seek congressional approval before any strikes on Iran. 'I will push for all Senators to vote on whether they are for this third idiotic Middle East war,' Kaine said in a statement, adding that the American public remains opposed to US involvement in the conflict. Massie, the Kentucky Republican who is leading the push in the House, said simply in response to Trump's airstrikes announcement: 'This is not Constitutional.' Democrats are also likely to press the White House on its decision not to inform their top officials until after the strike was carried out. Democrats on the Gang of Eight typically would be briefed before a significant US military engagement. 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'President Trump misled the country about his intentions, failed to seek congressional authorization for the use of military force and risks American entanglement in a potentially disastrous war in the Middle East.' As of Saturday night, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman was the sole congressional Democrat to praise the strikes, posting on X, 'As I've long maintained, this was the correct move by @POTUS. Iran is the world's leading sponsor of terrorism and cannot have nuclear capabilities. I'm grateful for and salute the finest military in the world.' While most House and Senate Republicans were quick to support the strikes as the 'right decision' or the 'correct move,' a small number of House conservatives warned that the strikes required congressional approval. Rep. Warren Davidson, an ex-Army ranger who has previously accused Congress of having 'seemingly surrendered its power over war' post 9-11, raised questions about Trump's authorities. 'While President Trump's decision may prove just, it's hard to conceive a rationale that's Constitutional. I look forward to his remarks tonight,' the Ohio Republican wrote on X. Before Trump announced the strikes, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene also warned against striking Iran in a post on X. 'Every time America is on the verge of greatness, we get involved in another foreign war. There would not be bombs falling on the people of Israel if Netanyahu had not dropped bombs on the people of Iran first. Israel is a nuclear armed nation. This is not our fight. Peace is the answer,' the Georgia Republican wrote. After the strikes, she added, 'Let us join together and pray for the safety of our U.S. troops and Americans in the Middle East. Let us pray that we are not attacked by terrorists on our homeland after our border was open for the past 4 years and over 2 Million gotaways came in.' Manu Raju, Lauren Fox, Haley Britzky and Alayna Treene contributed to this report.
Vox
34 minutes ago
- Vox
This time it's Trump's war
is a senior correspondent at Vox covering foreign policy and world news with a focus on the future of international conflict. He is the author of the 2018 book, Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood , an exploration of border conflicts, unrecognized countries, and changes to the world map. US President Donald Trump addresses the nation, alongside US Vice President JD Vance, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, from the White House in Washington, DC on June 21, 2025. Carlos Barria/Pool/AFP via Getty Images Donald Trump claimed during his 2024 campaign for president that America had fought 'no wars' during his first presidency, and that he was the first president in 72 years who could say that. This was not, strictly speaking, true. In his first term, Trump intensified the air war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, ordered airstrikes against Bashar al-Assad's Syrian regime in response to chemical weapons use, and escalated a little-noticed counterinsurgency campaign in Somalia. But in those cases, Trump could say, with some justification, that he was just dealing with festering crises he had inherited from Barack Obama. Likewise, the president has repeatedly claimed that the wars in Gaza and Ukraine never would have happened had he been president when they broke out, rather than Joe Biden. That's a counterfactual that is impossible to prove, and he may have been overly optimistic in his promises to quickly negotiate an end to both those conflicts, but it's fair to say that both are wars Trump inherited rather than chose. This time, it's different. This time, it's Trump's war. On Saturday night, the United States bombed three nuclear sites in Iran at Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan, ending weeks of speculation about whether the US military would join the Israeli war on Iran that began more than a week ago. The past few days in Washington have felt a bit like the battles over intelligence in the lead-up to the war in Iraq, but run in fast-forward. Rather than pressuring intelligence agencies to justify his preferred course of action, Trump has simply overruled them. Rather than building a case before Congress and the UN for the need to act, he's simply ignored them. Trump argued that Iran brought the attack on themselves by not taking the deal he was offering — but negotiations were ongoing at the time Trump abandoned the diplomatic path. Trump endorsed the Israeli assessment that war was necessary because new information showed Iran was 'very close to having a weapon.' But this contradicts the very recent statements from his own intelligence agencies and director of national intelligence. According to the Wall Street Journal's reporting, officials in these agencies were not convinced by Israel's new evidence that something dramatic had changed in Iran's nuclear program. It also contradicts Trump's own statements from earlier this month when he publicly discouraged Israel from attacking Iran, saying it would derail his efforts to negotiate a new nuclear deal. It's hard to overstate just how fast the Trump administration's policy has shifted. Just a month ago, Trump appeared to be giving Netanyahu's government the cold shoulder, pursuing direct diplomacy with Israel's staunchest enemies – including Iran – and cozying up to governments in the Gulf that plainly had no appetite for a new war. Now Trump has not only endorsed Netanyahu's war; he has joined it, and boasted in his brief statement from the White House on Saturday that the two had worked as a team like 'perhaps no team has ever worked before.' He ended his speech with 'God bless Israel' along with 'God bless America.' Tonight was also a major blow to those on the right, as well as some on the left, who hoped that the Trump administration would usher in either a new era of military restraint or a shift in priorities away from the Middle East toward China. (The US has now relocated military assets from Asia for this war.) There's still a lot we still don't know, but it's fair at this point to say that this is a war of Trump's choosing. Trump's extraordinary gamble In his statement from the White House on Saturday night, Trump said that the operation had been a 'spectacular military success' and that the enrichment facilities had been 'totally obliterated.' For the moment, we don't have corroborating evidence of that. Israel had mostly avoided striking these sites itself. Only the US has the powerful GBU-57 'bunker buster' bombs that can destroy Iran's most security nuclear sites, particularly the underground uranium enrichment facility at Fordow, and only the US has the aircraft that can carry them. US officials told the New York Times that US bombers dropped a dozen bunker busters on Fordow on Saturday. Many experts believe the facility would be difficult to destroy and require multiple strikes, even with those bombs. Doubts about whether Fordow could be destroyed were reportedly one reason why Trump hesitated in ordering these strikes. In his statement, Trump also implied that this was a one-off operation for now. Speaking of the pilots who dropped the bombs, Trump said, 'hopefully we will no longer need their services at this capacity' but also threatened that if Iran did not 'make peace' then 'future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier.' He added: 'There are many targets left.' The hope appears to be that Iran will now be forced to cut a deal to entirely give up its nuclear program. But an Iranian regime mindful of its own legitimacy is also likely to retaliate in some form, possibly by targeting some of the roughly 40,000 US troops deployed around the Middle East. The hope may be that these will be limited tit-for-tat strikes like those that followed the US assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani in 2020, though subsequent assessments have found that those attacks did more damage than was initially thought and could easily have killed far more US troops. In any event, the Iranian regime is far more desperate now, and once the missiles start flying, it could get very easy for things to escalate out of control. If Iran has any remaining enrichment infrastructure, either at these sites or hidden elsewhere throughout the country, the country's leaders may now feel far less hesitation about rushing to build a bomb. There was long a view that Iran's leaders preferred to remain a 'threshold nuclear state' — working toward a bomb without actually building one. In this view, they believed that their growing capacity to build a weapon gave them leverage, while not actually trying to build one avoided US and Israeli intervention. That logic is now obsolete. It's also not clear that Israel simply wants nuclear concessions from the Iranian regime. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that new intelligence about Iran's nuclear capabilities was the reason for starting this war, it's been clear both from the Israeli government's rhetoric and choice of targets that this is a war against the Islamic Republic itself, and that regime change may be the ultimate goal. Trump didn't mention regime change in his statement, but he has now committed American military power to that Israeli war. So far, this war has been characterized by stunning Israeli tactical successes, as well as the seeming impotence of Iran and its once vaunted network of regional proxies in its response. (Though it's unclear how long Israel's air defense system can keep up if Iranian strikes continue at this pace.) This may have emboldened a president who has backed off of actions like this in the past, convincing him that striking Iran's nuclear program now would be effective and that the blowback would be manageable.
