As Russia’s war on Ukraine grinds into a fifth year, President Volodymyr Zelensky has secured fresh backing from Britain, France and Germany for a push to launch direct ceasefire talks with Moscow.
Mr Zelensky met British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz at 10 Downing Street during defence talks in London.
In a joint statement issued after the meeting, the leaders said they “supported the proposal for a direct dialogue between Ukraine and Russia – with active US and European participation – to bring about a ceasefire and support further negotiations”.
“The current line of contact should be the starting point for negotiations,” it said.
“International borders must not be changed by force.”
Mr Zelensky’s diplomatic push follows an open letter he published on Thursday proposing a face-to-face meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The Ukrainian leader has reiterated his request to meet Vladimir Putin face-to-face
Mr Putin rejected the idea, saying he saw “no point” in meeting Mr Zelensky until a possible peace deal had been agreed.
Speaking to Sky News, the Ukrainian president said he had also used a meeting in Kyiv with Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich to relay a message to Mr Putin.
“You are fighting against us on our territory,” Mr Zelensky said of the message delivered via Mr Abramovich, who is sanctioned by the UK and European Union over his ties to the Kremlin following Russia’s invasion.
“We will not leave and we will not go out from our territory, no we will not give you victory,” he said, adding that he again pressed for a direct meeting with Mr Putin.
Ukraine, facing daily Russian strikes, has continued to urge Western allies to speed up ammunition deliveries for its air defences.
Mr Zelensky is also looking for additional ways to increase pressure on Russia to halt the fighting.
Earlier, he wrote on X that he would be meeting with Britain’s King Charles III later today.
Nuclear site targeted
Ukraine said it came under fresh waves of Russian drones and other munitions yesterday, and officials reported that one strike damaged a nuclear storage facility near the Chornobyl disaster site.
Ukraine’s nuclear energy operator, Energoatom, said radiation levels remained within normal limits after the attack, though the facility’s fuel reception building was “partially destroyed”.
Drone attacks between Russia and Ukraine have surged in recent months, even as US-led diplomatic efforts to end the war have stalled and been sidetracked by the conflict in the Middle East.
The strike damaged a fuel-reception building (Photo credit: Energoatom)
In an earlier online post, Mr Zelensky said Russia had used an Iranian-designed Shahed drone to “hit one of the buildings of the Centralised Spent Fuel Storage Facility” in the Chornobyl exclusion zone.
“As of now, there are no readings exceeding normal background radiation levels. But there is certainly an increase in Russia’s brazenness, which long ago went off the charts,” he said.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said it was sending a team to assess the damage, describing the incident as “deeply concerning”.
The facility sits in a remote forested area about a dozen kilometres (seven miles) from the site of the 1986 Chornobyl nuclear disaster, and is intended to store spent fuel from Ukraine’s three active nuclear plants.
Deadly strikes
Russia and Ukraine again traded accusations of attacks on civilians.
Ukrainian authorities said a Russian bombardment of a public transport stop in the southern Zaporizhzhia region killed at least two people, and that a separate nearby drone strike killed a 56-year-old minibus driver.
In the central Dnipropetrovsk region, Governor Oleksandr Ganzha said on Telegram that separate Russian attacks killed two men.
Across the border in Russia, local authorities in the Belgorod region said a Ukrainian drone strike hit a car, killing a woman and injuring her husband.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and millions driven from their homes since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Russia now occupies around a fifth of Ukraine, including the Crimean peninsula annexed in 2014, most of the eastern regions of Donetsk and Lugansk – collectively referred to as the Donbas — and large parts of the southern Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.
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