What is in the 28-point US plan for Ukraine? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Can the US get all sides to end the war? Why is Europe opposing Trump's peace plan? Here's where things stand on Sunday, November 30. A Russian drone attack killed one person and wounded 11, including a child, on the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, regional Governor Mykola Kalashnyk said on Sunday.

Is the fall of Pokrovsk inevitable? Is Trump losing patience with Putin? Will sanctions against Russian oil giants hurt Putin? Ukraine is working to resume prisoner exchanges with Russia that could bring 1,200 Ukrainians home, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says, a day after his national security chief announced progress in negotiations. "We are counting on the resumption of POW exchanges," Zelenskyy wrote on X on Sunday.

Is the fall of Pokrovsk inevitable? Is Trump losing patience with Putin? Will sanctions against Russian oil giants hurt Putin? Ukraine faces'exhausting battles' against Russia in Zaporizhia, Donetsk Russian forces pressed into Ukraine's eastern towns of Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad during the past week as Kyiv's military mounted a stout defence. On Tuesday, Ukraine's commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskii said almost half of the battles on a 1,200km (745-mile) front were happening in the two towns, claiming Russia has committed 150,000 troops - almost a quarter of its strength in Ukraine - to capturing them.

Is Trump losing patience with Putin? Will sanctions against Russian oil giants hurt Putin? Russian and Ukrainian troops have fought battles in the ruins of Pokrovsk, a transport and logistics hub in eastern Ukraine, with Ukraine's military reporting fierce fighting under way in a part of the city that was key for Kyiv's front-line logistics. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he visited troops fighting near the eastern city of Dobropillia, where Ukrainian forces are conducting a counteroffensive against Russian troops. Russia struck civilian energy and port infrastructure in a massive overnight drone attack on Ukraine's southern region of Odesa, the region's governor said in a post on the Telegram messaging app, adding that rescuers extinguished fires and there were no casualties.

How much of Europe's oil still comes from Russia? The European Union is preparing to adopt a new round of sweeping sanctions against Russian energy exports on Thursday, a day after United States President Donald Trump imposed similar measures against Moscow amid setbacks to his efforts at diplomacy with Vladimir Putin. These steps come as Russia and Ukraine are increasingly targeting each other's energy infrastructure in an attempt to make it economically harder to wage war. On the ground, Russia's war in Ukraine remained stagnant. Russia claimed it had taken another handful of villages during the past week - Tykhe and Pishchane in Kharkiv, Novopavlivka, Chunyshyne and Pleshcheyevka in Donetsk, Poltavka in Zaporizhia and Privillia in Dnipropetrovsk. On the whole, however, Ukrainian front lines remained resilient and Russia scored no major breakthrough.

Plans for a groundbreaking rare earths refinery in East Yorkshire have been abandoned, after the company behind the project decided to seek investment in the United States instead. Pensana has spent the past seven years developing a rare earths mine in Angola. The $268m (£185m) project, one of the largest of its kind in the world, will begin delivering raw materials in 2027. The company had planned to build a refinery at the Saltend Chemicals Plant near Hull, which would have processed the raw materials into metals used to create powerful magnets. These magnets would then be used in high-tech applications such as motors for electric vehicles, wind turbines and robotics.

Simulation-based learning has enabled policies for precise, contact-rich tasks (e.g., robotic assembly) to reach high success rates (~80%) under high levels of observation noise and control error. Although such performance may be sufficient for research applications, it falls short of industry standards and makes policy chaining exceptionally brittle. A key limitation is the high variance in individual policy performance across diverse initial conditions. We introduce Refinery, an effective framework that bridges this performance gap, robustifying policy performance across initial conditions. We propose Bayesian Optimization-guided fine-tuning to improve individual policies, and Gaussian Mixture Model-based sampling during deployment to select initializations that maximize execution success. Using Refinery, we improve mean success rates by 10.98% over state-of-the-art methods in simulation-based learning for robotic assembly, reaching 91.51% in simulation and comparable performance in the real world. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these fine-tuned policies can be chained to accomplish long-horizon, multi-part assembly$\unicode{x2013}$successfully assembling up to 8 parts without requiring explicit multi-step training.

Three killed in latest Ukrainian strike on Russia's Belgorod region Three people have been killed and at least nine others injured in Ukraine's latest attack on the Russian border region of Belgorod, according to its governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov. The deaths happened following a strike on the village of Maslova Pristan early on Wednesday, Gladkov said. Emergency workers were continuing to search for people feared trapped under rubble. It is the third consecutive day that Ukraine has struck the region, leaving thousands of people without power and at least two other people dead. Ukraine has not commented on the attacks but has repeatedly struck targets inside Russia, including Belgorod, during the conflict, which is now in its fourth year.

How is Russia replenishing its military? What is a'coalition of the willing'? How China forgot promises and'debts' to Ukraine How are Europe, the US pulling apart on Ukraine? Despite Russian drone strikes, Kharkiv's factories stand firm for Ukraine's security Russian forces killed two people in Ukraine's Kherson, including a 49-year-old woman who was found dead in the rubble of her home, authorities said, a day after Russian attacks killed six people across the country. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukrainian soldiers were advancing in the border areas of the northern Sumy region, and said Russian forces had suffered significant losses in the Donetsk and Kharkiv regions along the 1,000km (620-mile) front line.

How is Russia replenishing its military? What is a'coalition of the willing'? How China forgot promises and'debts' to Ukraine How are Europe, the US pulling apart on Ukraine? Russia's Putin hails war advances; Ukraine retakes parts of Donetsk John Psaropoulos is an independent journalist based in Athens and has been Al Jazeera's correspondent in Southeast Europe since 2012. Ukraine reclaimed 62sq km (24sq miles) of territory last month, its commander in chief revealed on Monday, contradicting Russian President Vladimir Putin's recent claim to be advancing "in all directions".