Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on the outgoing US administration of President Joe Biden on Sunday to help convince Nato members to invite Ukraine to join the alliance, as Ukraine’s war with Russia enters an unpredictable new phase.
The US was not considering returning to Ukraine the nuclear weapons it gave up after the Soviet Union collapsed, said White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan on Sunday.
The Russian defence ministry said on Sunday its forces had gained control over two settlements, Illinka and Petrivka, in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.
Zelensky urges Biden to rally support for Ukraine’s Nato membership
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on the outgoing US administration of President Joe Biden on Sunday to help convince Nato members to invite Ukraine to join the alliance, as Ukraine’s war with Russia enters an unpredictable new phase.
Kyiv wants Nato members to issue an invitation at an alliance meeting in Brussels this week as the invasion grinds toward its three-year mark and Russia makes battlefield gains.
Zelensky spoke to reporters in Kyiv alongside the new president of the European Union’s council of member states, Antonio Costa, who travelled to Ukraine on his first day in office to show support for Kyiv in its war with Russia.
The Ukrainian leader, who has been calibrating Ukraine’s positions before Donald Trump succeeds Biden in January, acknowledged that some Nato allies were still wary of inviting Kyiv to join the alliance, which obliges all members to aid each other if attacked.
“There are two months left in the current administration in the United States,” he said. “They have influence on those few European sceptics of our future [in Nato].”
Trump has criticised the scale of US support for Ukraine and has promised to end the war quickly, without saying how.
Russia and Ukraine have both interpreted this as increasing the likelihood of peace talks, which are not known to have been held since the first months after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Both foes have tried to improve their positions on the battlefield and among diplomatic allies.
Moscow’s troops have been capturing village after village in Ukraine’s east, part of a drive to seize the industrial Donbas region, while Russian airstrikes are targeting a hobbled Ukrainian energy grid as winter sets in.
In November, the Biden administration granted Ukraine permission to use Western weapons to strike further into Russian territory. Moscow responded by attacking Ukraine with a new intermediate-range ballistic missile and has threatened further strikes on government sites in Kyiv.
Kyiv has long demanded Moscow withdraw all troops from its territory, and said Ukraine must be granted guarantees for its security comparable to Nato membership to prevent Russia from attacking again. Moscow, which controls nearly a fifth of Ukrainian territory, demands recognition of its annexation of Ukrainian land and permanent neutrality for Ukraine.
In an interview last week, Zelensky floated the idea of his country being granted Nato membership even while Russia occupies some captured territory, a solution he said could end the “hot stage” of the war.
In his remarks on Sunday Zelensky clarified that any invitation to join the alliance must extend to all Ukrainian territory, even if the alliance’s collective defence agreement might not operate in areas occupied by Russian forces.
“There can be no Nato invitation to [only] a part of Ukrainian territory,” he said, saying an invitation extended only to parts of Ukraine would amount to recognising that other parts were no longer Ukrainian.
Costa, who visited Ukraine along with the new EU foreign policy chief and the bloc’s head of enlargement on the day they all took office, said the EU had “stood with you since the very first day of this war of aggression, and you can count on us to continue to stand with you”.
“These are not just words,” added Costa, a Portuguese former prime minister who replaced Charles Michel as president of the European Council and chair of EU summits.
Costa said Ukraine’s process of joining the EU was marked by “a sense of urgency” and the bloc could take steps to integrate Ukraine before its entry, such as coordinating mobile phone roaming rules and letting some goods into the single market.
“We cannot manage this process as business as usual because it is a geopolitical choice,” he said.
US will not return nuclear weapons to Ukraine
The US was not considering returning to Ukraine the nuclear weapons it gave up after the Soviet Union collapsed, said White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan on Sunday.
Sullivan made his remarks when questioned about a New York Times article last month that said some unidentified Western officials had suggested Biden could give Ukraine the arms before he leaves office.
“That is not under consideration, no. What we are doing is surging various conventional capacities to Ukraine so that they can effectively defend themselves and take the fight to the Russians, not [giving them] nuclear capability,” he told ABC.
Last week, Russia said the idea was “absolute insanity” and that preventing such a scenario was one of the reasons why Moscow sent troops into Ukraine.
Kyiv inherited nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union after its 1991 collapse but gave them up under a 1994 agreement, the Budapest Memorandum, in return for security assurances from Russia, the US and Britain.
Russian forces 'have captured' two settlements in Ukraine’s east
The Russian defence ministry said on Sunday its forces had gained control over two settlements, Illinka and Petrivka, in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.
It also said that Russian air defence had shot down 55 Ukrainian drones in the past 24 hours.
Russian forces hold a little less than 20% of Ukraine’s territory and have advanced through the Donetsk region over the past two months at their fastest rate since March 2022, according to open-source data.
They are approaching Kurakhove and the town of Pokrovsk to the north, the site of the sole colliery that supplies Ukraine’s steel industry with coking coal.
Putin approves military-focused 2025-2027 budget
Russian President Vladimir Putin has approved a military-focused budget for 2025-2027, a document published on the official legal acts website showed on Sunday.
The state budget for next year includes a 25% hike in military spending but will be the most secretive in post-Soviet history, with almost a third of all spending closed to public scrutiny.
The government has acknowledged that the needs of what Moscow calls its special military operation in Ukraine and support for the military will remain the budget priority along with social needs and technological development.
The government has presented the draft budget as “balanced”, with the deficit falling to 0.5% against this year’s projected deficit of 1.7% and state debt remaining below the 20% mark for the next three years.
Three killed in Russian drone attack on Ukraine’s Kherson
At least three people were killed in a Russian drone attack on the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, said the regional governor on Sunday.
Seven more people were wounded in the morning attack, which targeted public transportation, wrote Oleksandr Prokudin on the Telegram messaging app.
Russian forces withdrew from Kherson city in late 2022 but have regularly attacked the regional capital with artillery and drones from the other side of the Dnipro River.
Russian drones target Kyiv in overnight strike
Russia launched attack drones at Kyiv in its latest overnight air strike on the Ukrainian capital, said city officials on Sunday.
Air defences destroyed around a dozen drones over the city, according to military administrator Serhiy Popko. No injuries were reported after debris fell on one city district, he said.
Reuters correspondents heard explosions above the city later in the morning during the second air-raid alert of the day.
Russia has regularly sent missiles and drones at Ukrainian settlements far beyond the frontline of its nearly three-year-old invasion, targeting the energy grid in particular as winter sets in.
Russia has right to exercise self-defence against Ukraine - North Korea’s Kim
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has told the Russian defence minister that Ukraine’s use of long-range weapons is the result of direct military intervention by the US and Moscow is entitled to fight in self-defence, state media said on Saturday.
Kim met Russian Defence Minister Andrei Belousov on Friday and said “the US and the West made Kyiv authorities attack Russia’s territory with their own long-range strike weapons” and Russia should take action to make “hostile forces pay the price”, said the KCNA news agency.
“The DPRK government, army and people will invariably support the policy of the Russian Federation to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity from the imperialists’ moves for hegemony,” KCNA quoted Kim as saying.
DPRK is short for North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Kim pledged to expand ties with Russia in all areas including military affairs under the comprehensive strategic partnership he signed with Putin in June, which includes a mutual defence agreement, said KCNA.
Moscow and Pyongyang have dramatically advanced ties since their leaders held a summit in September last year in Russia, and the North has since shipped more than 10,000 containers of ammunition, as well as self-propelled howitzers and multiple rocket launchers, according to South Korea’s spy agency.
South Korea’s spy agency has said North Korea has sent more than 10,000 troops to Russia and they have been moved to the frontlines, including the Kursk region where Russian forces are trying to expel Ukrainian forces.
Ukraine has fired US Atacms missiles to strike Russian territory after the Biden administration gave permission to use them for such an attack this month.
Russia in turn unleashed attacks against Ukraine’s military and energy infrastructures, saying it was in response to the use of US medium-range missiles. DM