Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said on Friday that Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s rejection of his proposal for a meeting to end more than four years of conflict showed that the Kremlin had no wish to end the war.

“Unfortunately, ‌the Russian side is once ⁠again choosing war – everyone hear the response. A weak response,” Mr Zelensky said in his ‌nightly video ​address. “I think ‌this response ⁠will have disappointed ⁠many in the ‌world.”

“He does not want to change anything, and he does not want to admit that this war appeals only to him – and to those who are making money off him. They were all smiling very broadly today.

“That means Russia must have less money, and there must be more pressure on Russia,” he said.

Armenia’s parliamentary elections on Sunday will be a vote on its geopolitical future as incumbent prime minister Nikol Pashinyan seeks closer relations with the European Union and the United States despite longstanding ties with Russia that have been championed by his critics.

Many analysts favour Mr Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party to retain control of the parliament, but with many opposition parties running on pro-Russia platforms, the Caucasus nation’s place on the international stage has been thrown into the spotlight.

In the months ahead of the election, Russian president Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials have warned Armenia that joining the EU could come at the expense of massive economic damage by disrupting Armenian trade ties with Moscow and its allies.

“These are the first elections in Armenia’s history where geopolitical orientation has become a decisive issue,” Mikayel Zolyan, an analyst and former member of the Armenian parliament, told the Associated Press from Yerevan.

“Until now, Armenia has remained within Russia’s sphere of influence, and this was taken for granted, but now, for the first time, this is being called into question.”Relations between Moscow and Armenia soured in 2023 after Azerbaijan took control of the entire Karabakh region.

The mountainous region had been controlled for decades by ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia, part of a long conflict between the neighbouring countries.

Armenian authorities accused Russian peacekeepers deployed to the region of failing to stop Azerbaijan’s onslaught. Moscow, busy with the conflict in Ukraine, has rejected the accusations, arguing its troops didn’t have a mandate to intervene.

“It turned out that Russia’s image as a guarantor of Armenian security was not based in reality, and it all collapsed after the Karabakh war,” said Alexander Iskandaryan, director of the Caucasus Institute in Yerevan.

Mr Pashinyan has begun cautiously weakening ties with Moscow, joining the International Criminal Court in 2023 and suspending its participation in the Moscow-dominated Collective Security Treaty Organisation in 2024.

Montenegro is on track to become a member of the European Union by 2028, the bloc’s leaders and the Balkan country’s president said on Friday following a summit focused on expanding the EU to include other countries in the region.

Ukraine and Moldova are also among about 10 countries aspiring to join the bloc, while Iceland will hold a referendum in August on whether to apply.

Leaders from across the EU were joined by their Western Balkan counterparts in Montenegro’s Adriatic Sea coastal town of Tivat, where they discussed the bloc’s enlargement into a region seen as a key area in countering security and economic threats posed by Russia and China.

The summit brought together leaders including president Emmanuel Macron of France and German chancellor Friedrich Merz, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen as well as the heads of Balkan candidate countries.

High on the agenda was Montenegro’s EU accession, a process that is approaching its final stages and which von der Leyen said Friday was “within reach.”“If I had to sum up this summit in two words, they would be determination and confidence,” Ms von der Leyen told a news conference.

“Confidence that our union will grow in the years ahead.”

The EU has already formed a working group to draft an accession treaty for Montenegro, whose president, Jakov Milatovic, said the summit had given him “even greater confidence” that his country will fulfill its aim of joining the EU by 2028.

Raed Arafat, the head of Romania’s Department for Emergency Situations, told a news conference on Friday morning that helicopters had been deployed to search for more drones and that the authorities had issued text message alerts to residents.

The measure came after a Ukrainian maritime drone used against Russia exploded at a black sea port in Romania.

“There is a possibility that there may be other drones,” he said.

“We are not panicking. These are preventive measures. If there are other drones, we want to make sure there is not another explosion in an area where people are not evacuated.”

After the port explosion, more than 1,300 people were evacuated from several Black Sea beaches and the routes leading to them were temporarily blocked. Just before 3pm, the emergency authorities announced they had suspended evacuation measures.

A Ukrainian maritime drone that was being used in the country’s war against Russia exploded on Friday at a Black Sea port in Romania, while three other sea drones exploded outside the port, Romanian authorities said. No one was injured.

The drone that self-detonated in the port of Constanta exploded at around 10.30am, after the area had been secured and isolated by the Romanian intelligence service, coast guard and the defence ministry, authorities said.

“Immediately after identifying the drone, the Ministry of Defence contacted its Ukrainian counterparts, who confirmed that they had lost control of the operation of four drones,” the Romanian government said in a statement. “The other three drones self-detonated – two offshore and the third outside the port.”

“Confirmation of these events came from both the Ukrainian side and from data obtained by the Romanian authorities,” it added.

Romanian president Nicusor Dan said in a statement online that the Ukrainian forces “lost control of the assets as a result of electronic warfare actions by Russia,” likely jamming, and that the drone’s incursion into “Romanian sovereign space is a direct consequence of the war waged by Russia” against Ukraine.

The Ukrainian Navy confirmed in a statement that it had lost control of an unmanned naval boat “while performing tasks in the Black Sea operational zone,” and that its military was in contact with Romanian authorities “to prevent losses among the civilian population”.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said on Friday that Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s rejection of his proposal for a meeting to end more than four years of conflict showed that the Kremlin had no wish to end the war.

“Unfortunately, ‌the Russian side is once ⁠again choosing war – everyone hear the response. A weak response,” Mr Zelensky said in his ‌nightly video ​address.

“I think ‌this response ⁠will have disappointed ⁠many in the ‌world.”

The Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant is Europe’s ⁠largest with six reactors. Seized by Russian troops in the early weeks of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, each side has since accused the other of undertaking military actions to compromise nuclear safety.

The plant’s Russian-installed management accused Ukraine on Thursday of deploying more than 20 drones to attack a nearby thermal plant vital to supplying the facility with external power.

The plant generates no electricity, but needs external power ‌to ensure that nuclear fuel at the site does not ​overheat.

The latest ceasefire was the sixth negotiated since late last year to carry out repairs to the power lines. In its statement, the IAEA said the plant’s second external power ⁠line was also down following attacks on two electrical substations located on the opposite bank of ‌the Dnipro River from the ​nuclear plant.

The facility was relying on ‌diesel generators as it did for a ​month last year in similar circumstances.

Russia’s nuclear energy corporation Rosatom yesterday said that a Ukrainian drone had deliberately struck engineers demining an area around the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, injuring at least three people.

Rosatom said the incident occurred at the start of a ceasefire around the plant, brokered by the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, to ⁠restore the main external power line to ​the ⁠plant.

“The strike was clearly calculated,” Rosatom head Alexei Likachev said in comments posted on social media. “Three of our engineers were injured. Two are in serious condition.”

“The international community must know of the continuing attempts to inflict ​maximum ⁠damage on the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power ‌Plant, on the personnel responsible for ensuring its safety… despite the agreements that have been reached.”

In a separate statement, Rosatom said five people were hurt.

The IAEA said ‌it had been informed of the incident by ‌the plant’s Russia-installed management, and its director general Rafael Grossi, writing on X, called for maximum military restraint and full adherence to the ceasefire.

There was no immediate comment from Ukraine.

Russian president Vladimir Putin held a one-on-one meeting with former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, which was “good and friendly,” Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov was ⁠quoted as saying yesterday by Russian news agencies.

“The discussion was friendly. It was in the form of a tete-a-tete, one on one,” the agencies quoted Mr Ushakov as saying.

“I honestly don’t know any of the details. It took place in Moscow, in the Kremlin.”In his comments to journalists, Mr Ushakov said Russian officials were engaged in numerous ⁠informal contacts.

“I can well imagine that there are a lot of informal contacts and we simply don’t know about them,” the agencies quoted him as saying. Mr Schroeder was the German Chancellor from 1998 to 2005, when his Social ‌Democratic Party was voted out of ‌office.

He subsequently worked for Russian state companies and cultivated a close relationship with Mr Putin. The Russian president last month suggested that he would be willing to negotiate ⁠new security arrangements for Europe, with Mr Schroeder as his preferred partner.

But EU foreign ministers at a meeting in Brussels rejected any role for Mr Schroeder, with the EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas saying that would allow the former chancellor to “be sitting on both sides of the table”.

Mr Ushakov said he ‌made no public statements about his own informal contacts, ​including with the special US envoys dealing ‌with the conflict in Ukraine – Steve ⁠Witkoff and Jared Kushner, president Donald Trump’s son-in-law.

He noted ⁠that US diplomacy was focused on events in Iran, but said a forthcoming ‌visit by Mr ​Witkoff and Mr Kushner to Moscow ‌was “being prepared, but the dates ​have not been agreed”.