The EU ambassador to Ukraine, Katarina Mathernova, has described the horrors of Russia’s overnight air attack on Kyiv.

“The Russians bombed us all night. Kyiv was exploding and burning. We were all hiding in shelters,” she wrote.

“I went to sleep in the shelter. My hotel room was not safe. Just as homes, apartments and children’s bedrooms were not safe for women, children and the elderly across Kyiv.”

Romania's SRI intelligence service prevented a sabotage operation coordinated by Russia on Romanian territory, it said on Tuesday.

We’ll bring you more on the operation as it comes in.

Donald Trump has spoken over the phone with Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin has said.

The pair discussed the outcome of the visit by US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Kyiv and Moscow, along with the possibility of restoring US-Russia ties.

The Russian president also told his US counterpart what Washington could do to bring an end to the fighting sooner.

Putin also shared with Trump an assessment of what the current battlefield situation is.

Moscow has no hostile plans to the rest of Europe, he added.

Ukraine's prosecutor general on Monday announced that he has offered his resignation citing political reasons, in the latest sign of disunity in the senior ranks of the Ukrainian ruling elite.

“This is a ⁠political decision, and I have made it consciously. I do not want the position of Prosecutor General to be used as an instrument of political confrontation,” Ruslan Kravchenko said in a ⁠statement on Telegram late ​on ⁠Monday, without elaborating.

Kravchenko thanked president Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukraine's parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, and asked them to accept his resignation.

Ukraine's anti-graft agencies, the NABU and SAPO, ​said ⁠last week they had uncovered ‌a criminal organisation dealing with fraudulent call centres which was allegedly arranged by an official within the Prosecutor ‌General's Office.

Kravchenko has denied he was involved in the alleged scheme.

“My position regarding the accusations remains unchanged,” he said in his Telegram post.

Kravchenko's resignation offer follows other ⁠changes among top officials in Ukraine as it continues to battle Russia, which launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Prime minister Andy Burnham and US president Donald Trump agreed on the need to "continue working towards a ceasefire that prevented more loss of life" following a fresh wave of talks, Downing Street said.

Mr Burnham spoke with Mr Trump on Monday afternoon.

It follows a visit to Kyiv on Sunday by US envoys, who held talks in an effort to end the conflict with Russia.

A Downing Street spokesperson said: “On Ukraine, the two leaders agreed on the need to continue working towards a ceasefire that prevented more loss of life.

“The Prime Minister reiterated the UK’s support for Ukraine and for recent US-led peace negotiations.

“On the Middle East, the Prime Minister set out the UK’s commitment to working towards peace and security in the region, stressing the importance of the Two-State Solution, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, and ensuring that Iran never acquires a nuclear weapon.”

Read the full report here:

As we earlier reported, the Polish Air Force was conducting preventive operations related to Russian missile attacks on Ukraine, it said in a Tuesday morning update.

It later said that the Air Force had ended operations related to Russian strikes on Ukraine.

“We ⁠inform you that no violations ‌of ​airspace ‌were recorded," ⁠the ⁠army ‌said.

Hours earlier, Polish airport in Lublin resumed air operations after temporary closure due to operations of military aviation, the Polish Air Navigation Services Agency (PANSA) said.

Steve Witkoff is the real estate guy with zero diplomatic experience who Donald Trump appointed in 2024 as his personal “peace emissary”. Jared Kushner is the president’s son-in-law, but did at least play some role in one of President Trump’s few foreign policy achievements – the Abraham Accords process that promised to deliver some stability to the Middle East during the first Trump term. As a team, they have enjoyed little success in securing the “settlement” to the war in Ukraine that Mr Trump so desires.

There is little reason to suppose that their latest exercise in shuttle diplomacy will succeed where their previous efforts failed. Indeed, the prospects for an end to the war, let alone one that will prove just and lasting, are as dismal as at any time since Vladimir Putin launched his ill-fated “special military operation” more than four and a half years ago – its duration now longer than the Soviet Union’s four-year “great patriotic war” against Adolf Hitler. Just as in that epoch-defining conflict, it is the civilian population of Ukraine that will face some of the harshest consequences as winter approaches.

Before the Witkoff-Kushner double act set out for Moscow and Kyiv, Mr Trump expressed his usual confidence in the pair – he could hardly do otherwise – and declared that “we have an idea for peace”. This idea remains opaque. Yet, for a change, this may be more than the usual self-flattering bluster. After a period when, easily bored, Mr Trump lost interest in the region (the situation in Iran didn’t help), this unexpected flexing of US power comes as a surprise.

On Sunday, the Alternative for Germany won 43.8 per cent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, the strongest result any far-right party has achieved in a German state election since the Second World War. It took 39 of the 83 seats, three short of an outright majority.

In Berlin, the result is being called an earthquake. In Kyiv, it is being read as a countdown.

I have spent the better part of two decades fighting Vladimir Putin. He does not need to win elections in other people’s countries. He only needs to wait for them.

The AfD has never hidden what it would do. Its programme calls for an end to military aid to Ukraine, an end to sanctions on Russia and the reopening of the Nord Stream pipelines. In June, the party’s foreign policy spokesman flew to St Petersburg, against the explicit advice of the German foreign ministry, and met the head of Gazprom and one of Putin’s senior envoys to discuss restarting Russian gas. Putin’s envoy posted afterwards that he looked forward to building a great future together with the AfD.

None of this is a secret. It is a manifesto.