Trump says no Tomahawks for Ukraine, for now

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Sunday that, for now, he is not considering a deal that would allow Ukraine to obtain long-range Tomahawk missiles for use against Russia.

Trump has been cool to a plan for the United States to sell Tomahawks to NATO nations that would transfer them to Ukraine, saying he does not want to escalate the war.

“No, not really,” Trump told reporters as he flew to Washington from Palm Beach, Florida, when asked whether he was considering a deal to sell the missiles. He added, however, that he could change his mind.

Trump and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte discussed the Tomahawk idea when they met at the White House on 22 October. Rutte said on Friday that the issue was under review and that it was up to the United States to decide.

Tomahawk missiles have a range of 2,500 km (1,550 miles), long enough to strike deep inside Russia, including Moscow.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has requested the missiles, but the Kremlin has warned against any provision of Tomahawks to Ukraine.

Despite these requests, the Pentagon has cleared the potential sending of Tomahawks directly to Russia in certain scenarios, though the final decision rests with the U.S. President.

Meanwhile, Trump’s attempts to bring peace to the region have hit a wall, with ongoing battlefield stalemates and diplomatic frustrations stalling progress toward a ceasefire.

Ukraine says its troops still holding out the gateway to Donetsk

Ukraine’s top military commander said on Saturday his troops were still holding out in the embattled eastern city of Pokrovsk, which Moscow said its forces were at last enclosing in a pincer movement after more than a year of fighting.

Russia has been trying to capture Pokrovsk, dubbed “the gateway to Donetsk”, since mid-2024 in its campaign to control the entirety of Donetsk, a Ukrainian province it claims to have annexed. Capturing Pokrovsk would be the most important Russian territorial gain inside Ukraine since Moscow took the ruined city of Avdiivka in early 2024 after one of the bloodiest battles of the war.

Since then, Russia has made steady but slow gains in intense fighting along the 1,000 km front line, believed to have killed tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides. Kyiv says the costly fighting is largely stalemated and its territorial losses marginal; Moscow says it is still making important gains.

‘We are holding Pokrovsk’

“We are holding Pokrovsk,” Ukraine’s army chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said on Facebook. “A comprehensive operation to destroy and dislodge enemy forces from Pokrovsk is ongoing.”

The city, home to 70,000 people before the war, has been all but completely destroyed and depopulated.

Russian officials say control of Pokrovsk and Kostiantynivka to its northeast would allow Moscow to drive north towards the two biggest remaining Ukrainian-controlled cities in Donetsk – Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.

They have described increasing advances in the Pokrovsk area in recent days. Reuters has not been able to verify the battlefield accounts because access is restricted on both sides.

Deepstate, a Ukrainian map of the front line made by compiling data from open-source images, shows Russian troops in full control of a small southern part of the city, with most of the rest of it still depicted as a grey zone, fully controlled by neither force.

In a later report, Deepstate said Russian forces were still infiltrating southern parts of Pokrovsk, with a significant number of infantry troops remaining inside.

But it said Ukrainian forces were identifying and eliminating groups of enemy troops, creating larger “grey zones”, with neither side in full control. Senior officers, it said, had been deployed in the city and were using specialised units to track down infiltrating forces.

The Russian Defence Ministry’s Zvezda news outlet said on Saturday that Ukrainian troops were beginning to lay down arms inside Pokrovsk, and released a video of two men it said were Ukrainian soldiers who had surrendered. Reuters could not verify the video or determine where or when it was filmed.Kyiv said this week it had landed a helicopter with a team of special forces in Pokrovsk in a mission to halt the Russian advance. Russia’s Defence Ministry said on Saturday its troops had killed all 11 members of that Ukrainian special forces team.

A Ukrainian military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, denied that the special forces had been killed and said the operation was continuing.

Russia also said its troops had pushed back a Ukrainian unit’s attempt to break out of Hryshyne, northwest of Pokrovsk. Battles in that area could indicate Russian forces are close to cutting off Ukrainian supply lines to Pokrovsk.

Ukraine’s military said the situation in Pokrovsk “remains difficult and dynamic” but the army had “managed to improve its tactical position in several quarters of the city”.

Russia wants to take the whole of the Donbas region, which comprises Luhansk and Donetsk provinces. Ukraine still controls about 10% of Donbas – an area of about 5,000 square in western Donetsk.

With Reuters, edited by g.g.

Caption: US President Donald Trump walks on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC, USA, 2 November 2025. EPA/Francis Chung / POOL