Ukraine war briefing: Zelenskyy wants new system to control Ukraine drone sales

Foreign countries and firms that wish to buy Ukrainian drones should not be able to bypass the Ukrainian government by talking directly to manufacturers, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in remarks released Sunday. Zelenskyy said a new system was needed to prevent this from happening, and that his government had already reprimanded one manufacturer for selling interceptors without considering the implications for Ukraine’s defences. The US-Israel war with Iran has sparked renewed interest in Ukrainian drone interceptors, with the United States and its Middle Eastern allies looking for ways to counter Iranian drone attacks.

Ukraine is waiting on Washington and Moscow for the next round of trilateral peace talks, Zelenskyy said. The Ukrainian president told reporters that the US had proposed hosting a meeting, but Russia refused to send a delegation. “We are waiting for a response from the Americans,” added Zelenskyy.

Zelenskyy appeared to push back against Donald Trump’s claim that the US did not need Ukraine’s help on drone defence. The US has reached out to Ukraine “several times” to ask for help for a particular country, or for support for Americans, Zelenskyy said. “All our institutions received these requests, and we responded to them,” he told a briefing, without providing specifics.

Trump said on Sunday that Nato faces a “very bad” future if US allies fail to help open the strait of Hormuz, the critical oil transport conduit effectively shut by Iran in the Mideast war. In a brief interview with the Financial Times, Trump said that as the US has aided Ukraine in the war with Russia, he expects Europe to help on the strait of Hormuz, whose closure has sent energy prices soaring around the world. “If there’s no response or if it’s a negative response I think it will be very bad for the future of Nato,” said Trump, who over the years has criticised the alliance as freeloading on US largesse.

Mr Nobody Against Putin, about a young Russian schoolteacher waging quiet resistance against Russia’s war on Ukraine, won the Oscar for best documentary feature on Sunday. The film, directed by David Borenstein and Pavel Talankin, uses two years of footage shot by Talankin to show how the Russian state indoctrinates students with pro-war messages. The videographer documents his own persecution and eventual exile in the film, which The Hollywood Reporter called a “touching, intimate chronicle”.

Moldova triggered an environmental alert following a fuel spill in the Dniester River triggered by a Russian military strike in Ukraine, the government said on Sunday. Authorities have “declared a state of environmental alert in the Dniester River basin for 15 days, effective March 16, 2026”, the CNMC government crisis management centre said in a statement. The fuel spill is thought to have been caused by a Russian attack on the Dniester hydroelectric Power Plant in Ukraine on 7 March.

After the US waived sanctions on Russian oil, Zelenskyy said he was against allowing oil from Russia to transit through Ukraine via the Druzhba pipeline, which until late January transported Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia. “Why can we, in one case, tell the United States that we oppose lifting sanctions, while on the other hand forcing Ukraine to resume oil transit through Druzhba – and at a political price that effectively pays for anti-European policies?” Zelenskyy asked.

In 2023, what were thought to be Nazar Daletskyi’s remains were buried in his home village and his mother, Nataliia, visited the grave every week. Three years later, he spoke to her on the phone. Read Shaun Walker’s extraordinary story of the soldier who came back from the dead.