President Nikos Christodoulides said on Monday that the United Nations has proposed dates for a joint meeting between the leaders of the two communities and the UN Secretary-General’s personal envoy on Cyprus Maria Angela Holguin, with the Greek Cypriot side having already responded positively.

Christodoulides said he was approaching Tuesday’s meeting with Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhurman with the sole aim of achieving positive developments.

“I am going to the meeting with one and only one objective: to have positive developments,” he said.

“We have a discussion which has begun and is continuing, and I hope we will have a positive outcome. We have also been given some dates for Ms Holguin’s arrival and a joint meeting between the three of us.

“We have responded positively. I believe the Turkish Cypriot leader will also have responded positively, and I genuinely hope that tomorrow we will have positive news to announce,” he added.

Asked when Holguin was expected to arrive in Cyprus, Christodoulides said the announcement would be made by the United Nations, confirming that her visit would take place before the end of October.

On whether Tuesday’s meeting could result in an announcement on the opening of four new crossing points, the president said the Greek Cypriot side was ready to proceed, provided there was a positive response from the Turkish Cypriot side.

“I hope there will be. We are ready. If there is a response, of course we are ready to proceed with such an announcement,” he said.

He added that the Greek Cypriot side was also prepared to move forward on other issues raised by the UN Secretary-General, including the substance of negotiations, methodology and confidence-building measures.

Asked whether there had been a positive response from the Turkish Cypriot side, Christodoulides declined to speak on its behalf.

On the night of Oct. 2, Russian drones struck Kyiv's Southern Bridge once again. The city closed it and Paton Bridge, restricted traffic on Metro Bridge, and was gridlocked by multi-kilometer traffic jams by morning.

On the same day, Oleksii Honcharenko, a member of parliament from the opposition

US President Donald Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on 18 October that he did not want to “drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table.” He also wrote: “Signing that document at this time will do that, and I can sign it later, or any time that I want!”

Trump was referring to sanctions and tariffs under the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, which he waived in an executive order on 16 October, days before the measures were due to take effect. The waiver suspends additional economic penalties intended to pressure Moscow over its war against Ukraine, while leaving earlier US sanctions in place. The decision came weeks before the 3 November midterms, in which Republicans are defending slim majorities in both chambers, and analysts said the penalties could have pushed up oil prices for Americans already paying more, largely because of the US-Israeli war with Iran, Reuters reported.

Trump says Zelenskyy could have made a better deal two years ago

A week before the waiver, Trump had announced a deal for Russia to increase diesel supplies to global markets. The Treasury also issued a license, valid until 7 April 2027, permitting certain transactions in Russian-origin diesel.

In the Truth Social post, Trump accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of targeting Russian diesel refineries, saying the strikes were “seriously hurting the world diesel markets, including those in the United States.” Kyiv had paused its refinery strikes for three days at Washington’s request after Trump declared an energy ceasefire on 11 October, which Russia never confirmed, then resumed them. Since then, Russia has struck Ukraine’s energy sector 76 times, Zelenskyy said on 18 October.

Trump wrote that Zelenskyy “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did,” and that he “could have made a better deal two years ago than he can now.”

“His country is in shambles, a large portion of his land is lost, his oceans and seas are gone, and his male population is low, wounded, and/or dead,” Trump added.

He also said Russia was “doing very little, if anything, to help” Iran and that he wanted to keep it that way.

A day earlier, Trump said he had not made a final decision

On 17 October, Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago that he had not announced his final decision. “A lot of you don’t know what my decision is yet, but we’ll figure it out, and you’ll figure it out,” he said, Reuters reported.

“I think the president wants to take the 60-day period of time to sort of analyze what imposing both sanctions and tariffs will mean to the global economy and even to the US economy,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters before departing for Uzbekistan the same day.

Zelenskyy calls the waiver a pity as Republicans split

Zelenskyy called it a “pity” that Trump had waived sanctions under a law named for the late Senator Lindsey Graham, who “really believed in Ukraine.” He said he hoped Trump would change his decisions, NBC News reported.

Discussing the diesel deal on NBC’s Meet the Press, Zelenskyy said US oil prices had risen because shipping through the Strait of Hormuz was blocked, not because of Ukraine.

On 17 October, Zelenskyy told journalists that “the decision to undo all of this, to block all of it, seems wrong to me” and that it “definitely helps only the Russians.” His remarks appeared in Ukrainian on his official Telegram channel.

“Sanctions relief will continue. I think the diesel deal and the move regarding the Lindsey Graham Act are not the end of it. Unfortunately,” Zelenskyy said.

On 19 October, Zelenskyy wrote that partners had again given no warning of Russia’s overnight ballistic attack and that blocking missiles for Ukraine’s air defense while Russia gets sanctions eased or postponed amounts to partners denying reality.

Republican Senator James Lankford defended Trump’s decision on NBC’s Meet the Press, saying the president was “choosing the American people first.”

Senator Darline Graham, Lindsey Graham’s sister, whom Trump has endorsed for a full term, said at a campaign stop on 17 October that she would “choose to keep the pressure on Russia.”

“I don’t trust Putin and I don’t trust Russia,” Darline Graham said.

She did not directly criticize Trump but said she would not have made that choice, Reuters reported.

"A trilateral meeting between the leaders of Ukraine, the U.S., and Russia could help end the war sooner," Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said. "A trilateral meeting between the leaders of Russia, China, and the U.S. would do only the opposite: encourage Putin to continue this war."

President Nikos Christodoulides and Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhurman will meet on Tuesday, government spokesman Konstantinos Letymbiotis said on Monday, with the meeting the latest of ongoing weekly discussions being held by the pair.

“Our goal remains to achieve substantive progress in the effort to resume negotiations from the point at which they were interrupted, within the agreed-upon framework,” Letymbiotis said.

He added that “we approach this with the same constructive spirit, consistency, and concrete proposals, in the conviction that, through substantial dialogue, the conditions for the next steps can be created”.

The meeting will come just three days after the two leaders jointly attended a bicommunal festival in the Larnaca district village of Pyla, with Christodoulides saying of their presence at the festival that “we are sending a message of peace”.

“We are sending a message of … coexistence and a message regarding the need to finally reunify our homeland. I reiterate what I said in a recent interview with the Turkish Cypriot press: if it were up to the Greek Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots, out homeland would certainly be reunified,” he said.

However, the two leaders’ positions remain considerably apart on a range of issues, including political equality in a post-solution Cyprus, with Christodoulides on Sunday accusing Erhurman of “setting preconditions” in the latter’s insistence on a rotating presidency between the two communities should a solution be found.

“It is clear that the Turkish side … is setting terms and preconditions for the resumption of talks. They are demanding that we accept, in advance, specific positions of interest to the Turkish Cypriot community, while showing absolutely no willingness to discuss or accept our own positions on other significant aspects of the Cyprus problem,” he said.

The rotating presidency is viewed by the Turkish Cypriot side as being fundamental to the political equality between Cyprus’ two major communities which is stipulated by United Nations resolutions.

Dana: Rotating presidency an indispensable component of political equality

Erhurman’s undersecretary Mehmet Dana had told the Cyprus Mail that it is an “indispensable component” of political equality, saying that “political equality forms the foundation of a structure requiring the joint exercise of a limited number of specific powers, shared competences, and this is not open to negotiation”.

Disagreements also remain over the question of what the pair should be discussing at their meetings, with Christodoulides having put forward 19 new points for discussion at a meeting last month.

The substance of those 19 points has not been publicly disclosed, though Erhurman has described them as “throwing a spanner in the works”.

He said he believes the discussions should be based on he “seven proposals for confidence-building measures which [United Nations Secretary-General Antonio] Guterres voiced on the island at the end of July”.

Those seven issues were crossing points, mine clearance, the citizenship of children born of mixed marriages, sports, joint disaster response and a joint mechanism to combat irregular migration.

Meanwhile, UN envoy Maria Angela Holguin is expected to return to the island before the end of this month, and she said on Saturday that confidence-building measures across Cyprus’ divide “need to be implemented” so as to “create trust and demonstrate with facts the actual political will” for rapprochement.

“If, over the past two years, the parties have been unable to agree on a crossing point to facilitate communication, demining, or a joint effort to eliminate plastic pollution across the island … how can they agree on a political, economic and social model capable of overcoming decades of division and growing distance between the two communities?” she asked, while speaking to newspaper Politis.