Russia warned the United States on Thursday against making “unacceptable” arms deliveries to Ukraine, the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov “stressed that it was unacceptable to continue supplying weapons to the Kyiv regime” in a meeting with his US counterpart Marco Rubio in Manila, it said.
Lavrov condemned “a destabilising policy by European countries, which are still seeking to inflict a ‘strategic defeat’ on Russia,” in their meeting held on the sidelines of an Asian summit.
He repeated that the Russian side was ready for a “political-diplomatic resolution to the the conflict”, according to the foreign ministry.
The encounter — the first between Lavrov and Rubio since September 2025 — comes at a time that Washington’s focus has switched from mediating in Ukraine to dealing with war in the Middle East.
Ukrainian strikes kill three in Russia
Ukrainian strikes killed three people, including a child, and wounded eight in Russia and in Moscow-annexed Crimea on Thursday, local authorities said.
In their fifth year of war, Moscow and Kyiv have escalated air strikes deep behind each other’s lines, driving the civilian toll to its highest since 2022, while fighting on the front has remained at a standstill.
On the outskirts of Voronezh, 500 kilometres (310 miles) south of Moscow, a “three-year-old boy died” in a fire that broke out at his home after a drone crashed on it, regional governor Alexander Gusev wrote on Telegram.
The boy’s parents sustained “various wounds,” he said, adding that a young man had also been wounded in a separate drone attack in the same area.
In Russia’s Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, one man was killed and another wounded when a Ukrainian drone struck a vehicle, regional authorities said in a statement on Telegram.
In Crimea, the peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014, a Ukrainian attack killed one person and wounded four others, including two children, Moscow-installed governor Sergei Aksyonov said.
US-led talks on resolving the conflict have stalled since Washington’s attention turned to the Middle East, while Russia sticks to its hardline demand that Ukraine cede territory.
