Ukraine war briefing: Don’t walk away from Ukraine, Biden expected to tell Trump

Joe Biden has invited Donald Trump to come to the Oval Office on Wednesday, and is expected to discuss with the president-elect why “the United States should not walk away from Ukraine”. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, said on Sunday that the two would talk about what’s happening in Europe, in Asia and the Middle East. He told Face the Nation on CBS: “President Biden will have the opportunity over the next 70 days to make the case to the Congress and to the incoming administration that the United States should not walk away from Ukraine, that walking away from Ukraine means more instability in Europe.” Sullivan has said the White House aims to spend its remaining $6bn of funding for Ukraine before Trump takes office. Trump will not be inaugurated until January. Sullivan said the White House aims “to put Ukraine in the strongest possible position on the battlefield so that it is ultimately in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table”.

Ukraine has launched its biggest ever drone attack on Moscow, Luke Harding reports, while Russia targeted Ukraine with more Shahed suicide UAVs than it has ever used in one night. “Last night, Russia launched a record 145 Shaheds and other strike drones against Ukraine,” said the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on Sunday.

Russia said 34 Ukrainian attack drones targeted Moscow on Sunday, in the largest such attack on the capital since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Andrei Vorobyov, the Moscow region governor, called it a “massive” attack. It forced the temporary closure of three airports, wounded a 52-year-old woman and set two homes on fire in the village of Stanovoye in the Moscow region, officials said. Russia said that in all its air defences shot down 70 drones, nearly half of them in the skies above Moscow and the rest in western Russia.

The general staff of Ukraine’s armed forces said it successfully targeted an ammunition dump near the Russian city of Bryansk. Video showed multiple explosions coming from warehouses on the military site. Fires could be seen burning in the night sky.

A report in the Washington Post said Donald Trump, the next US president, had a phone call with Vladimir Putin where he told the Russian president not to escalate his war against Ukraine. Ukraine’s foreign ministry said it was not informed in advance of the call between Trump and Putin and subsequently could neither endorse nor object to it. Trump has boasted that he can broker a quick end to the war.

Ukrainian politicians are expressing tentative hopes that the return of Trump will not necessarily lead to a rapid and humiliating forced peace, Dan Sabbagh writes from Kyiv. Oleksiy Goncharenko, a Ukrainian opposition MP, said: “I don’t think that Trump’s victory is a catastrophe. Ukraine is now his business and if negotiations lead to a disaster it will be his, like Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. This is a person who loves to win.”

The UK is examining all possible options when it comes to Trump’s approach to Ukraine, the chief secretary to the Treasury has said, Jessica Elgot writes. Darren Jones told Sky News: “We don’t want any countenance of the idea that we’re stepping back from that [British commitments to Ukraine]. That’s why we’re offering them £3bn a year, which you know, in the fiscal context here in the UK, is difficult but the right decision for us.”

Speaking to the BBC on Sunday, the UK’s chief of the defence staff, Adm Sir Tony Radakin, said Russia was paying an “extraordinary price” for Putin’s war, and October was its worst month for losses since the conflict began in February 2022. “Russia is about to suffer 700,000 people killed or wounded – the enormous pain and suffering that the Russian nation is having to bear because of Putin’s ambition,” he said, adding that the only gains were “tiny increments of land”. The cost of the war, which he put at more than 40% of public expenditure on defence and security, was also “an enormous drain” on Russia.

Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, will join the French president, Emmanual Macron, in Paris for the French Armistice Day service in a pointed show of European solidarity after Trump’s re-election, with Ukraine and defence on the agenda for private talks between the two leaders, writes Jessica Elgot.