Some European diplomats in Seoul are weighing whether they can still trust South Korea as a like-minded partner if it grows closer to Russia, the Financial Times reported on 28 October, according to South Korea’s Financial News. One European diplomat also told the FT that Seoul wants to resume trade with Russia as soon as the war ends.
As Russia presses its war against Ukraine, Kyiv’s partners count on each other to keep up the pressure on Moscow. The doubts about South Korea now come from its European partners, not only from Kyiv. The report lands eight days after Seoul said it would withdraw about half its staff from Kyiv over a dispute about two North Korean prisoners of war.
According to the FT, European diplomats saw a South Korean pilot voyage along Russia’s Arctic sea route as a sign of a tilt toward Russia, since the voyage required extensive cooperation from Moscow.
Meanwhile, on 1 October, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung appointed Song Young-gil, a six-term lawmaker and former chair of parliament’s foreign affairs committee, as his special adviser on peace diplomacy. Song once served as a special envoy to Russia, the FT noted.
On 20 October, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko said Seoul had signaled it wants to normalize relations but says full normalization can come only after a change in the geopolitical situation, which he said means the end of the war in Ukraine.
The FT also cited reports of fuel shipments to Russia. A Guardian analysis published on 6 October found that more than 176,000 tons of fuel, mostly diesel, were loaded at South Korean ports in July and August. The fuel went onto seven tankers bound for Russia’s Far East, three of them under UK and EU sanctions. The Guardian said the trade does not appear to breach South Korean law.
On 8 October, South Korea’s foreign and trade ministries and customs service said no diesel, jet fuel, or gasoline had been exported to Russia through customs. They said they would examine the tankers’ routes and any divergence from their declared destinations before judging whether the law had been broken.
Ukraine’s sanctions commissioner Vladyslav Vlasiuk said the shipments helped Russia offset refinery losses caused by Ukrainian strikes. South Korea’s presidential office called the claim inaccurate and inappropriate, saying the key facts of the transactions had not been verified.
In a statement to the FT, South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said concerns in some quarters that the country was leaning too far toward Russia were not based on fact. It added that Seoul supports international efforts to end the war in Ukraine.
At the same time, relations with Ukraine have deteriorated over the transfer of two North Korean prisoners of war to South Korea, which Zelenskyy disclosed at the UN General Assembly in September. Seoul says the disclosure broke a confidentiality understanding. Dmytro Lytvyn, Zelenskyy’s communications adviser, wrote in a Facebook comment on 25 September that “there was no such agreement.”
On 20 October, Seoul said it would withdraw roughly half its diplomatic staff from Kyiv, citing Kyiv’s failure to take “positive steps” on the POW dispute and continued Russian airstrikes, Yonhap reported. A chargé d’affaires and all consular staff will stay.
Russia's sanctioned Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is heading to a G20 meeting in the US, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stated. Moscow plans to use the trip to argue against sanctions, days after Russian ballistic missiles hit Kyiv. Ukraine, meanwhile, is still waiting for Washington's sign-off on the air defense missiles it needs.
Ukraine is fighting Russia's air war while its main ally squeezes it too, from capped Starlink links to missing US warnings of incoming ballistic missiles, leaving Kyiv weaker before any talks. A new round of the US-Russia-Ukraine trilateral talks is expected in Abu Dhabi in November.
Lavrov will lead the Russian delegation at the G20 foreign ministers' meeting, which the US hosts in Atlanta on 30–31 October. In his speeches, he will denounce “the use of economic ‘weapons’ to fight opponents, including sanctions,” Russia's Foreign Ministry stated. The US Treasury sanctioned Lavrov on 25 February 2022, the day after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The ministry claimed its delegation ran into American red tape over visas. Journalists in Lavrov's press pool still received US visas without movement restrictions, Russian state news agency TASS reported.
The State Department's announcement of the meeting doesn't mention Russia or say whether Lavrov got a sanctions waiver. Republican Congressman Don Bacon told RFE/RL that Russian leaders “should not be welcomed in any of these forums.” “They lead a pariah state,” he said.
Lavrov will also stress “the cornerstone importance of indivisible security” as the basis of multipolarity, the ministry stated. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has ruled out neutrality and limits on Ukraine's army.
A day before the trip was announced, Lavrov called the US-Russia diesel deal a purely business arrangement. “There were no strings attached,” he claimed.
Lavrov brings these demands days after Russian ballistic missiles hit a Kyiv university campus and the Southern Bridge, killing a 46-year-old woman, the Kyiv City Prosecutor's Office reported. Kyiv has waited almost a month for US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's signature on Patriot and NASAMS missiles, Zelenskyy wrote.
The visit adds to a run of US moves in Moscow's favor. This month, the US Treasury cleared Russian diesel blocked by sanctions. US President Donald Trump then waived tariffs on buyers of Russian oil. US Energy Secretary Chris Wright also said investors could buy sanctioned shadow-fleet tankers and return them to legal trade. Russia, for its part, kept striking Ukraine's energy sites during the truce Trump announced.
Russian officials are also back in G20 rooms in person. In late August, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov attended a G20 finance meeting in Asheville, North Carolina. It was his first in-person G20 appearance since 2022, and European officials refused to join the group photo with him. The State Department has stated that Russia is welcome at all G20 meetings, and a senior US official said Russia would be invited to the leaders' summit in Miami in December.
Western ministers used to push back at those tables. When Lavrov spoke at the G20 meeting in Johannesburg in February 2025, then-British Foreign Secretary David Lammy said he saw no appetite for peace.
Former US President Barack Obama campaigned in Atlanta on 28 October, two days before Lavrov's meeting there.
“And while we're alienating key allies like Canada, the White House is bending the knee to Vladimir Putin of Russia and selling out Ukrainians who are fighting for their freedom and democracy,” Obama said.
He also likened Trump's self-enrichment in office to “what dictators in other countries do.”
Russia has started installing magnetometers in the tails or tail fins of its Geran attack drones, Vladyslav Vlasiuk, the Ukrainian president’s commissioner for sanctions policy, said on Facebook on 28 October.
Russia uses its Shahed-Geran series drones in massive daily attacks on Ukraine. Ukrainian forces jam Gerans’ satellite navigation to push them off course, and Russia keeps hardening the drones against it, already fitting them with adaptive antennas. The magnetometer appears designed to go further, giving the drone a heading that doesn’t depend on satellites at all. Earlier this month, Ukrainian military intelligence reported a US-made magnetometer in the upgraded Geran-4.
Vlasiuk posted photos from a site where Ukraine studies Russian weapons and their components. He said he takes the findings for Ukraine’s sanctions work. He did not say which Geran models carry the magnetometer.
At the same time, Ukraine is studying how a new jamming device works. Vlasiuk did not say where it was found or what it targets.
“Western electronics are at the core everywhere,” Vlasiuk wrote.
On 5 October, Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence (HUR) said the upgraded Geran-4 carries a new “MOKh” unit built around a PNI5GA magnetometer made by US firm PNI Sensor. The unit works with the SADRA inertial navigation module to cut gyroscope drift and make the drone’s autonomous navigation more accurate.
HUR said Russia also added an electro-optical navigation system called Susanin to the upgraded Geran-4. It compares camera images with a reference image stored in memory to keep the drone on its route to the target. The new K5 version of the Geran-5 uses a similar system.
Presidential adviser Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov warned on 28 October that if Russia starts using Susanin en masse on Geran-5s and other drones and missiles at night, Ukraine may have to go back to switching off lights, especially on roads.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told US President Donald Trump by phone on 28 October that Türkiye is ready to support efforts to revive Ukraine-Russia diplomacy and end the war that way, the Turkish presidency’s Directorate of Communications said. The same day, a White House official said the US will join the next round of talks with Kyiv and Moscow.
Talks between Ukraine, Russia, and the US have been stalled since winter, and the fight now is over timing. On 27 October, Zelenskyy said Kyiv wants that round before a Putin-Trump-Xi summit, which would leave Ukraine out of the room. Putin proposed that summit, The Wall Street Journal reported. Ankara’s statement names neither track, but Ukraine sits at the table only in the first.
The statement named no date or Turkish venue. In July, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said in Kyiv that the Türkiye-mediated Istanbul talks should continue in the same format. Türkiye hosted Russia-Ukraine talks in 2022 and 2025. The 2 June 2025 round in Istanbul ended with a prisoner swap deal but no ceasefire. In March, Zelenskyy named Türkiye among possible venues.
On 28 October, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov claimed it was premature to talk about Abu Dhabi: a contact was expected soon and Abu Dhabi had been mentioned as a venue, but Russia was still preparing. Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov claimed the talks would come after 4 November, with the date depending in part on the battlefield. On 27 October, Ukrainian presidential adviser Dmytro Lytvyn told journalists it was too early for announcements. A day later, Zelenskyy told The Sun that the round could come as soon as 10 November.
The White House official told Türkiye Today that the US “looks forward to participating in the next round of trilateral talks, which will take place soon.” The outlet’s question on whether Istanbul was considered had gone unanswered by publication.
Trump told reporters on 28 October that a meeting with Putin and Zelenskyy would be set up soon. The Kremlin keeps its condition. Ushakov claimed on 27 October that such a contact makes the most sense after the negotiation process ends, and repeated that Zelenskyy should come to Moscow.
Another mediator does not decide which meeting comes first. Kyiv and Moscow have both confirmed Abu Dhabi, Zelenskyy said, so it now depends on the US side. Earlier this month, Trump said he waived new sanctions on Russia so as not to drive Moscow from the talks.
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