The session in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, brought the first direct discussions between Ukrainian and Russian representatives in nine months as the push for a settlement stalled.

Finland will ban Russian athletes — including those competing as neutrals — ‌ahead of this month’s cross-country skiing World Cup opener in Ruka, the government said on Thursday.

As of 16 November, Russian citizens with Schengen visas will only be allowed into Finland to work in tasks that are deemed essential to the country’s national interests, the government ​said in a statement. That excludes sport, it said.

“As Russia’s war of aggression continues, Russian athletes have no ​business coming to Finland. Their entry would endanger Finland’s international relations,” foreign minister Elina Valtonen ⁠said.

Ukrainian drones have struck an oil refinery in Russia’s Volgograd city and a production facility in Rostov-on-Don, according to local reports.

The attack comes a day after trilateral peace negotiations in Abu Dhabi ended with US envoys visiting Vladimir Putin in Moscow and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky in Ireland.

The Ukrainian attack set the Lukoil-Volgogradneftepererabotka refinery, one of Russia’s largest oil refineries, ablaze.

US envoys met yesterday with Russian president Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin before heading to Ireland for talks with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky as Washington sought new momentum for its peace efforts.

Envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who is also president Donald Trump’s son-in-law, brokered talks this week between delegations from Moscow and Kyiv.

The session in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, brought the first direct discussions between Ukrainian and Russian representatives in nine months as the push for a settlement stalled.

The talks produced no major breakthrough, aside from an agreement to swap a large number of prisoners, with the exact figure still to be announced.

Russian strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure overnight caused power outages in 12 Ukrainian regions, deputy energy minister Artem Nekrasov said on Friday.

The affected ⁠regions ‌are Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Zhytomyr, Kyiv, ‌Mykolaiv, Odesa, ‌Rivne, Sumy, Kharkiv, Khmelnytskyi and ⁠Chernihiv.

“Energy workers are working at an intensified pace, but new attacks and constant air raid alerts are complicating and delaying repairs,” Nekrasov said.

Russia’s ​Investigative Committee, which handles serious crimes, said on Friday that it had ⁠opened an investigation into the explosion of a car in Moscow that Russian media ⁠reported ​belonged to ⁠an exiled Ukrainian political aide.

Russian media reported ⁠the car belonged to ​Sergei Zavorotniy, ⁠a onetime ‌spokesperson for former Ukrainian prime minister Mykola Azarov, who ‌has been living ‌in Russia since fleeing Ukraine amid anti-government protests in 2014.

Russian ⁠newspaper Kommersant reported that Zavorotniy was hospitalised.

It is the latest in a series of apparent assassination attempts inside Russia.

On Thursday, ‌a member of the ​Russian military was killed ‌after the ⁠car he was ⁠driving was blown up in St ‌Petersburg, ​investigators said.

There was no immediate comment from Ukraine on Friday. Ren ‌TV and the 112 Telegram channel both reported that Zavorotniy had lost his left arm in the attack, and that ‌he was in hospital with a concussion, ‌rib fractures and other injuries.

The Baza Telegram channel published a photograph of a black four-door car with a smashed windshield, doors and front bumper on a city street.

Russia’s Investigative Committee, which handles serious crimes, said it had opened an investigation into the incident.

A bracelet containing a sapphire once owned by Russia’s doomed Romanov family has fetched more than 4.1 million Swiss francs (£3.7 million) at auction in Geneva.

Sotheby’s said that the price vastly exceeded the expected price range of 850,000 to 1.7 million francs (£770,000 to £1.54 million) for the stone, which went under the hammer late on Wednesday.

The buyer was a private collector who was not identified.

The cushion-shaped sapphire weighs 197.80 carats and is a Ceylon stone that likely came from the Mughal Empire in South Asia.

Finland’s military said on Thursday its forces had detected “a strike” on a Russian warship in the Baltic Sea a ​day earlier, but that the security situation in the ‌area remained stable.

It was not immediately clear if there were any casualties or what had caused the strike. Estonian media reported on Thursday that ​the vessel was a small Russian navy ship and that ​it later returned to St Petersburg.

“The Finnish Defence Forces ⁠detected… a strike on a Russian warship in the Gulf ​of Finland area and has monitored the development of the situation,” ​a spokesperson for the Nordic country’s military said in an emailed statement to Reuters.

Finland is not under any immediate military threat, the spokesperson added.

The ​defence forces declined to provide further details about the location or ​timing of the incident, or how it was detected.

Russian president Vladimir Putin said Moscow had always been open to talking to the EU about Ukraine, but signalled serious outstanding differences.

“As far as the Europeans are concerned, we have never been opposed to engaging in dialogue with Europe, and we ​have never broken off that dialogue. It was they who broke off the dialogue with the Russian Federation,” he said.

He then warned that the European idea of sending Western troops into Ukraine once a peace deal was concluded would trigger a resumption of the ​war because Russia would see that as a threat to its own security.

“We would very much like you, gentlemen, and the US administration as a whole, to work with your European allies so that they can finally make up their minds as to what they want: peace or war in Ukraine,” said Putin.