Two opposing positions, no obvious compromise.

"This is what happens when a proud nation under attack doesn't listen to all those: 'Ukraine has only six months left'. 'You have no cards'. 'Just surrender for peace, Russia cannot lose'."Even more pithy was a tweet from the quarterly Business Ukraine journal, which proudly proclaimed "It turns out Ukraine does have some cards after all. Today Zelensky played the King of Drones."

This, then, is the message Ukrainian delegates carry as they arrive in Istanbul for a fresh round of ceasefire negotiations with representatives from the Kremlin: Ukraine is still in the fight.The Americans "begin acting as if their role is to negotiate for us the softest possible terms of surrender," the government official told Svyatoslav Khomenko."And then they're offended when we don't thank them. But of course we don't – because we don't believe we've been defeated."

Despite Russia's slow, inexorable advance through the battlefields of the Donbas, Ukraine is telling Russia, and the Trump administration, not to dismiss Kyiv's prospects so easily.Hanan Issa has just surpassed the halfway milestone in her five-year stint as National Poet for Wales.

Growing up, she said she never saw writing as a viable career: "I'm working class, raised in a council house and to me, it wasn't considered an option."

But as the 11-day Hay Festival draws to a close on Sunday, she has praised organisers for providing a space for people from marginalised backgrounds in what she said had traditionally been a "very white, middle class space".The defence ministry said on Saturday that more than £1.5bn in additional funding will spent on improving military homes as part of the government's review.

The extra funding will be used for urgent repairs, such as fixing faulty boilers and tackling mould, and for developing new housing.It follows a report by Commons defence committee last year which found two-thirds of homes for service families needed "extensive refurbishment or rebuilding" to meet modern standards.

The Liberal Democrats said it was glad the government "has finally come to their senses and listened", but called for ministers to go further by bringing military accommodation to the decent homes' standard, which sets minimum standards for social home conditions.Xiao Chen turned up at the US Consulate in Shanghai on Thursday morning, hours after Washington announced that it would