White House says talks ‘constructive’ but Russian negotiators not present; more civilians killed in country’s south-east by Moscow attacks. What we know on day 1,488 Ukrainian and US negotiators trying to secure a peace settlement of Russia’s invasion opened their latest round of talks in Florida on Saturday, with more discussions planned through the weekend. Russian representatives did not attend the meeting. “We continued discussing key issues and the next steps within the negotiation track,” the chief Ukrainian negotiator, Rustem Umerov, posted on X. Russian and Ukrainian negotiators met at two sets of US-brokered talks in the United Arab Emirates this year and a round in Geneva last month. Moscow and Kyiv agreed on prisoner exchanges, but no breakthroughs were achieved. The White House described the latest meeting as “constructive” , with discussions “focused on narrowing and resolving remaining items to move closer to a comprehensive peace agreement”. Russian attacks killed four people in south-eastern Ukraine and left much of the northern region of Chernihiv without power on Saturday, officials said. Zaporizhzhia governor, Ivan Fedorov, said the morning attack on the city killed a man and a woman, and injured six others, including two children. In the adjacent Dnipropetrovsk region, officials said two people died in an area south-east of the main regional centre, Dnipro. Five people were injured in attacks at multiple places. In his nightly video address, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said power had been cut to parts of Chernihiv region, where efforts were under way to fix damage after a drone strike on an energy facility. Power and water supplies have also been cut to parts of Kyiv. Ukrainian forces shelled a public building in Russia’s border region of Belgorod on Saturday, killing four people, the regional governor said. Vyacheslav Gladkov, writing on Telegram, said the attack hit a “social site” in the village of Smorodino, without giving further details. The bodies of two women were pulled from under rubble, he said. Belgorod has come under frequent Ukrainian attack during the four-year war. Authorities in nearly a dozen Russian regions in recent weeks cited various excuses to prevent demonstrations against internet censorship and the blocking of the popular messaging app Telegram. In most cases, they succeeded. Mindful of a crackdown on dissent since the invasion of Ukraine, activists decided not to risk holding unauthorised rallies, even if they weren’t about the war. Some went to court to challenge government refusals to authorise pickets, while others scaled them back to smaller indoor gatherings. Tens of thousands of Czechs filled a large plain in Prague to rally against the government of the billionaire prime minister, Andrej Babi, on Saturday, slamming it for “arrogance of power”. The Million Moments for Democracy movement organising the protest has criticised the government for “playing down” threats from Russia invading Ukraine . Protesters, some carrying Ukrainian flags, criticised its refusal to provide military aid to Ukraine. Babis leads a three-party nationalist cabinet comprising his catch-all ANO party, the far-right SPD and the rightwing Eurosceptic Motorists. “[The government] is doing everything to drag us towards Russia and, together with Hungary and Slovakia, to dent the EU,” Marek Perutka, a conservationist carrying a Ukrainian flag told Agence France-Presse. Continue reading...