Russia told Ukraine at peace talks on Monday that it would only agree to end the war if Kyiv gives up big new chunks of territory and accepts limits on the size of its army, according to a memorandum reported by Russian media.

The terms, formally presented at negotiations in Istanbul, highlighted Moscow’s refusal to compromise on its longstanding war goals despite calls by U.S. President Donald Trump to end the “bloodbath” in Ukraine.

Ukraine has repeatedly rejected the Russian conditions as tantamount to surrender, Reuters reported.

Delegations from the warring sides met for barely an hour, for only the second such round of negotiations since March 2022. They agreed to exchange more prisoners of war – focusing on the youngest and most severely wounded – and return the bodies of 12,000 dead soldiers.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan described it as a great meeting and said he hoped to bring together Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy for a meeting in Turkey with Trump.

But there was no breakthrough on a proposed ceasefire that Ukraine, its European allies and Washington have all urged Russia to accept.

Moscow says it seeks a long-term settlement, not a pause in the war; Kyiv says Putin is not interested in peace. Trump has said the United States is ready to walk away from its mediation efforts unless the two sides demonstrate progress towards a deal.

Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov, who headed Kyiv’s delegation, said Kyiv – which has drawn up its own peace roadmap – would review the Russian document, on which he offered no immediate comment.

Ukraine has proposed holding more talks before the end of June, but believes only a meeting between Zelenskiy and Putin can resolve the many issues of contention, Umerov said.

Zelenskiy said Ukraine presented a list of 400 children it says have been abducted to Russia, but that the Russian delegation agreed to work on returning only 10 of them. Russia says the children were moved from war zones to protect them.

The Russian memorandum, which was published by the Interfax news agency, said a settlement of the war would require international recognition of Crimea – a peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014 – and four other regions of Ukraine that Moscow has claimed as its own territory. Ukraine would have to withdraw its forces from all of them.

It restated Moscow’s demands that Ukraine become a neutral country – ruling out membership of NATO – and that it protect the rights of Russian speakers, make Russian an official language and enact a legal ban on glorification of Nazism. Ukraine rejects the Nazi charge as absurd and denies discriminating against Russian speakers.

Russia also formalised its terms for any ceasefire en route to a peace settlement, presenting two options that both appeared to be non-starters for Ukraine.

Option one, according to the text, was for Ukraine to start a full military withdrawal from the Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions. Of those, Russia fully controls the first but holds only about 70% of the rest.

Option two was a package that would require Ukraine to cease military redeployments and accept a halt to foreign provision of military aid, satellite communications and intelligence. Kyiv would also have to lift martial law and hold presidential and parliamentary elections within 100 days.

Russian delegation head Vladimir Medinsky said Moscow had also suggested a “specific ceasefire of two to three days in certain sections of the front” so that the bodies of dead soldiers could be collected.

According to a proposed roadmap drawn up by Ukraine, a copy of which was seen by Reuters, Kyiv wants no restrictions on its military strength after any peace deal, no international recognition of Russian sovereignty over parts of Ukraine taken by Moscow’s forces, and reparations.

The conflict has been heating up, with Russia launching its biggest drone attacks of the war and advancing on the battlefield in May at its fastest rate in six months.

On Sunday, Ukraine said it launched 117 drones in an operation codenamed “Spider’s Web” to attack Russian nuclear-capable long-range bomber planes at airfields in Siberia and the far north of the country.

Satellite imagery suggested the attacks had caused substantial damage, although the two sides gave conflicting accounts of the extent of it.

Western military analysts described the strikes, thousands of miles from the front lines, as one of the most audacious Ukrainian operations of the war.

Russia’s strategic bomber fleet forms part of the “triad” of forces – along with missiles launched from the ground or from submarines – that make up the country’s nuclear arsenal, the biggest in the world. Faced with repeated warnings from Putin of Russia’s nuclear might, the U.S. and its allies have been wary throughout the Ukraine conflict of the risk that it could spiral into World War Three.

A current U.S. administration official said Trump and the White House were not notified before the attack. A former administration official said Ukraine, for operational security reasons, regularly does not disclose to Washington its plans for such actions.

A UK government official said the British government also was not told ahead of time.

Zelenskiy said the operation, which involved drones concealed inside wooden sheds, had helped to restore partners’ confidence that Ukraine is able to continue waging the war.

“Ukraine says that we are not going to surrender and are not going to give in to any ultimatums,” he told an online news briefing.

“But we do not want to fight, we do not want to demonstrate our strength – we demonstrate it because the enemy does not want to stop.”

Eight people were injured on Sunday when a 45-year-old man yelled “Free Palestine” and threw incendiary devices into a crowd in Boulder, Colorado where a demonstration to remember the Israeli hostages who remain in Gaza was taking place, authorities said.

Four women and four men between 52 and 88 years old were transported to hospitals, Boulder police said. Authorities had earlier put the count of the injured at six and said at least one of them was in a critical condition, Reuters reported.

“As a result of these preliminary facts, it is clear that this is a targeted act of violence and the FBI is investigating this as an act of terrorism,” the FBI special agent in charge of the Denver Field Office, Mark Michalek, said.

Michalek named the suspect as Mohamed Soliman, who was hospitalized shortly after the attack. Reuters could not immediately locate contact information for him or his family.

FBI Director Kash Patel also described the incident as a “targeted terror attack,” and Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said it appeared to be “a hate crime given the group that was targeted.” Boulder Police Chief Stephen Redfearn said he did not believe anyone else was involved.

“We’re fairly confident we have the lone suspect in custody,” he said.

The attack took place on the Pearl Street Mall, a popular pedestrian shopping district in the shadow of the University of Colorado, during an event organized by Run for Their Lives, an organization devoted to drawing attention to the hostages seized in the aftermath of Hamas’s 2023 attack on Israel.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned on Saturday that the threat from China was real and potentially imminent as he pushed allies in the Indo-Pacific to spend more on their own defence needs, Reuters reported.

Hegseth, speaking for the first time at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, Asia’s premier forum for defence leaders, militaries and diplomats, underlined that the Indo-Pacific region was a priority for the Trump administration.

“There’s no reason to sugar coat it. The threat China poses is real, and it could be imminent,” Hegseth said, in some of his strongest comments on the Communist nation since he took office in January. He added that any attempt by China to conquer Taiwan “would result in devastating consequences for the Indo-Pacific and the world”, and echoed Trump’s comment that China will not invade Taiwan on the president’s watch.

China views Taiwan as its own territory and has vowed to “reunify” with the democratic and separately governed island, by force if necessary. It has stepped up military and political pressure to assert those claims, including increasing the intensity of war games around Taiwan.

Taiwan’s government rejects Beijing’s sovereignty claims, saying only the island’s people can decide their future.

“It has to be clear to all that Beijing is credibly preparing to potentially use military force to alter the balance of power in the Indo Pacific,” Hegseth said.

China said the comments “were steeped in provocations and instigation”.

“Mr. Hegseth repeatedly smeared and attacked China and relentlessly played up the so-called ‘China threat’,” the Chinese embassy in Singapore said on its Facebook page. “As a matter of fact, the U.S. itself is the biggest ‘troublemaker’ for regional peace and stability.”

Hegseth’s comments on allies needing to increase spending is likely to cause consternation amongst partners, even though experts said he faced a relatively friendly audience in Singapore. China’s Defence Minister Dong Jun has decided to skip the major Asian security forum and Beijing has sent only an academic delegation, read the report.

Hegseth has previously taken aim at allies in Europe for not spending more on their own defence. In February, he warned Europe against treating America like a “sucker” while addressing a press conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels.

On Friday, while delivering the keynote address at the Shangri-La Dialogue, French President Emmanuel Macron said Hegseth was justified in asking Europe to increase its own defence spending.

“It’s hard to believe, a little bit, after some trips to Europe that I’m saying this, but thanks to President Trump, Asian allies should look to countries in Europe as a new found example,” Hegseth said.

“NATO members are pledging to spend 5% of their GDP on defence, even Germany. So it doesn’t make sense for countries in Europe to do that while key allies in Asia spend less on defence in the face of an even more formidable threat, not to mention North Korea.”

Dutch Defence Minister Ruben Brekelmans said it was important to have Hegseth acknowledge that European countries were stepping up.

“It was for me maybe the first time or one of the first times I heard the U.S administration acknowledge this explicitly,” Brekelmans said, referring to Hegseth’s comments.

U.S. Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth, who is co-leading a bi-partisan delegation to the Shangri-la Dialogue, said it was noteworthy that Hegseth emphasised that the United States was committed to the region, but his language on allies was not helpful, Reuters reported.

“I thought it was patronising of our friends in the Indo-Pacific in particular,” Duckworth said.

Spending on weapons and research is spiking among some Asian countries as they respond to a darkening security outlook by broadening their outside industrial partnerships while trying to boost their own defence industries, according to a new study by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, the organisation that runs the Shangri-La Dialogue.

The spike comes even as Asian nations spent an average of 1.5% of GDP on defence in 2024, a figure that has kept relatively constant over the last decade, it said.

Hegseth suggested that allies in Europe focus on security on the European continent, so that Washington could focus on the threat posed by China in the Indo-Pacific, alongside more participation by allies in Asia.

“We would much prefer that the overwhelming balance of European investment be on that continent, so that as we partner there, which we will continue to do, we’re able to use our comparative advantage as an Indo-Pacific nation to support our partners here,” he said in response to a question after his speech.

Hegseth, a former Fox TV host who has spent much of his first months in office focused on domestic issues, spoke to the international audience on topics that he has frequently talked about when in the United States, like “restoring the warrior ethos.”

“We are not here to pressure other countries to embrace or adopt our politics or ideology. We are not here to preach to you about climate change or cultural issues,” Hegseth said. “We respect you, your traditions and your militaries. And we want to work with you where our shared interests align.”