Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged European countries on Thursday to provide guarantees to protect Ukraine after the war with Russia ends, but said these would not be enough without support from the US under Donald Trump.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that he was ready to compromise over Ukraine in possible talks with US President-elect Donald Trump on ending the war and had no conditions for starting talks with the Ukrainian authorities.
A court in Moscow on Thursday ordered the suspect in the killing of top Russian general Igor Kirillov to be sent to pre-trial detention for two months, the court said on its Telegram channel.
Ukraine needs European and US security guarantees to stop Putin, says Zelensky
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged European countries on Thursday to provide guarantees to protect Ukraine after the war with Russia ends but said these would not be enough without support from the US under Donald Trump.
While the fighting triggered by Russia’s 2022 invasion goes on with no end in sight, Western and Ukrainian officials have begun discussing post-war scenarios, prompted in part by President-elect Trump’s pledge to bring the conflict to a swift conclusion.
Addressing a summit of European Union leaders, Zelensky welcomed French President Emmanuel Macron’s proposal to deploy troops to Ukraine following an eventual ceasefire.
He told the leaders it was “crucial for Europe to make a significant contribution to security guarantees”.
“We support France’s initiative for a military contingent in Ukraine as part of these guarantees and call on other partners to join this effort, it will help bring the war to an end,” he told the closed-door meeting, according to a text posted on his website.
Zelensky said Ukraine would ultimately need more protection through membership of the Nato military alliance. Nato has said Ukraine will join its ranks one day but it has not set a date or issued an invitation.
In the meantime, Zelensky said, Ukraine could have separate guarantees from European nations and the US.
“It is impossible to discuss this only with European leaders, because for us, the real guarantees in any case — today or in the future — are Nato,” he told reporters.
“On the way to Nato, we want security guarantees while we are not in Nato. And we can discuss such guarantees separately with both the US and Europe,” he said.
Whether Trump would be prepared to offer such guarantees is an open question.
Trump has repeatedly called for a swift end to the nearly three-year-old war. On Monday he said Zelensky should be ready to reach a peace deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin, though he did not say whether this meant Kyiv ceding territory to Moscow as part of a negotiated settlement.
Russian forces occupy nearly a fifth of Ukrainian territory and are making steady advances in the east of the country.
EU leaders aimed to use Thursday’s summit to send a clear signal to Trump about their continued support for Ukraine and stress that any peace deal must involve Ukraine and respect its territorial integrity.
“The European Council … underlines the principle that no initiative regarding Ukraine be taken without Ukraine,” said an official declaration issued by the summit.
Zelensky said any end to fighting would have to be durable.
“We cannot live with a frozen conflict in our territory,” he told reporters.
Russia ready to compromise with Trump on Ukraine war, says Putin
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that he was ready to compromise over Ukraine in possible talks with Trump on ending the war and had no conditions for starting talks with the Ukrainian authorities.
Trump, a self-styled master of brokering agreements and author of the 1987 book Trump: the Art of the Deal, has vowed to swiftly end the conflict, but has not yet given any details on how he might achieve that.
Putin, fielding questions on state TV during his annual Q&A session with Russians, told a reporter for a US news channel that he was ready to meet Trump, whom he said he had not spoken to for years.
Asked what he might be able to offer Trump, Putin dismissed an assertion that Russia was in a weak position, saying that Russia had got much stronger since he ordered troops into Ukraine in 2022.
“We have always said that we are ready for negotiations and compromises,” said Putin, after saying that Russian forces, advancing across the entire front, were moving towards achieving their primary goals in Ukraine.
“Soon, those Ukrainians who want to fight will run out, in my opinion; soon there will be no one left who wants to fight. We are ready, but the other side needs to be ready for both negotiations and compromises.”
Reuters reported last month that Putin was open to discussing a Ukraine ceasefire deal with Trump, but ruled out making any major territorial concessions and insisted Kyiv abandon its ambitions to join Nato.
Putin said on Thursday that Russia had no conditions to start talks with Ukraine and was ready to negotiate with anyone, including Zelensky.
But he said any deal could only be signed with Ukraine’s legitimate authorities, which for now the Kremlin considered to be only the Ukrainian parliament.
Zelensky, whose term was due to expire earlier this year but has been extended due to martial law, would need to be re-elected for Moscow to consider him a legitimate signatory to any deal to ensure it was legally watertight, said Putin.
Putin dismissed the idea of agreeing to a temporary truce with Kyiv, saying only a long-lasting peace deal with Ukraine would suffice.
Any talks should take as their starting point a preliminary agreement reached between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators in the early weeks of the war at talks in Istanbul, which was never implemented, he added.
Some Ukrainian politicians regard that draft deal as akin to a capitulation which would have neutered Ukraine’s military and political ambitions.
Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has left tens of thousands dead, displaced millions and triggered the biggest crisis in relations between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Russia, which casts the conflict as a defensive special military operation designed to stop dangerous Nato expansion to the east, controls around a fifth of Ukraine and has taken several thousand square kilometres of territory this year.
Determined to incorporate four Ukrainian regions into Russia, Moscow’s forces have taken village after village in the east and are now threatening strategically important cities such as Pokrovsk, a major road and rail hub.
Putin said the fighting was complex, so it was “difficult and pointless to guess what lies ahead ... [but] we are moving, as you said, towards solving our primary tasks, which we outlined at the beginning of the special military operation.”
The war has transformed the Russian economy and Putin said it was showing signs of overheating, which was stoking worryingly high inflation. But he said growth was higher than many other economies such as Britain.
Asked if he’d do anything differently, he said he should have sent troops into Ukraine sooner than 2022 and that Russia should have been better prepared for the conflict.
Putin touted what he said was the invincibility of the Oreshnik hypersonic missile that Russia has already test-fired at a Ukrainian military factory, saying he was ready to organise another launch at Ukraine and see if Western air defence systems could shoot it down.
Suspect in killing of top Russian general sent to pre-trial detention
A court in Moscow on Thursday ordered the suspect in the killing of top Russian general Igor Kirillov to be sent to pre-trial detention for two months, the court said on its Telegram channel.
The suspect, a native of Uzbekistan, was charged with an act of terrorism resulting in the death of a person, said a notice on the court website.
Russia said on Wednesday it had detained a suspect who had confessed to planting and detonating a bomb in Moscow which killed Kirillov, who was the chief of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Troops, on the instructions of Ukraine’s SBU security service.
Lavrov ‘discussed Ukraine war with Swiss counterpart’
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov discussed the Ukraine war with his Swiss counterpart Ignazio Cassis in a phone call on Wednesday, said his ministry on Thursday.
Switzerland hosted a peace conference in June at the request of Zelensky, to which Russia was not invited. Zelensky has said he hopes to organise a follow-up meeting with Russia attending, although Moscow said in September it would take no part.
The Russian statement did not say if Lavrov and Cassis had talked about the proposed second conference but noted that Switzerland was “one of the countries showing interest in facilitating a settlement”.
“In light of Bern’s attempts to promote the idea of a settlement based on the ‘V. Zelensky formula’, the Russian side pointed out the absolute senselessness of counting on presenting Moscow with any ultimatums to resolve the Ukrainian crisis, agreed upon behind the scenes by the West and Kyiv,” it said.
It said the call was held at Switzerland’s initiative and the two sides agreed to continue contacts.
Ukraine fires more US and British missiles into southern Russia
Ukraine launched six US-made long-range Atacms missiles and four British-made Storm Shadow missiles at Russia’s southern Rostov region on Wednesday, said the Russian defence ministry on Thursday.
Russian forces downed all of the Atacms and three out of four of the Storm Shadows, said the ministry, adding that Moscow would respond to the attacks.
Ukraine began firing the Western missiles into Russia last month after getting permission from the US and Britain — something Moscow says makes those countries direct parties to the conflict.
Russian missile kills three in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region
A Russian missile attack killed three people and wounded three more in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region on Thursday, said the national police.
They added on the Telegram messenger that more than 10 private houses were damaged.
Russia will remain a threat to Europe even after Ukraine war, says Finland
Russia and countries that support it would remain a danger to Europe even after the war in Ukraine had ended, said Finnish Defence Minister Antti Hakkanen on Thursday.
Finland, like Ukraine, is a neighbour to Russia, sharing a more than 1,300km border that is currently closed to all travellers as Helsinki accuses Moscow of funnelling illegal migration to Europe.
Hakkanen, presenting a review of the Nordic country’s military, said he saw Russia’s increased cooperation with North Korea, Iran and China as a long-term risk.
“Russia, together with its allies, will remain a dangerous actor in Europe even after the war in Ukraine and we cannot exclude the possibility of [it] threatening European countries with the use of military force,” he said.
Finland on Thursday published its first defence policy review since it joined Nato last year in a historic policy shift brought on by the Ukraine invasion.
The review recommended that Finland should focus on strengthening its national defence, Nato’s deterrence and cooperation with individual allies, especially in regional surveillance and training.
"The main allies in our international cooperation are Sweden, Norway, the United States, Britain and Estonia," Hakkanen said, adding Finland was working with South Korea, Israel and Japan in securing defence materials. DM