here.
Here is a summary of the key headlines from today:
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Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Saturday he had urged Kyiv’s western allies to give “a clear position” on security guarantees including about a potential foreign troop contingent on Ukrainian soil with a US backstop. His comments came after UK prime minister Keir Starmer held a virtual call with other European leaders and allies, including Zelenskyy, where Starmer said a “coalition of the willing” would help secure Ukraine “on the land, at sea and in the sky” in the event of a peace deal with Russia.
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Starmer called for the “guns to fall silent in Ukraine” as he said military powers will meet next week as plans to secure a peace deal move to an “operational phase”. The UK prime minister said Vladimir Putin’s “yes, but” approach to a proposed ceasefire was not good enough, and the Russian president would have to negotiate “sooner or later”. Starmer also condemned Russia’s “barbaric attacks on Ukraine”.
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Starmer accused Putin of trying to delay peace, and said it must become a reality after more than three years of war. The UK prime minister was speaking at a press conference in Downing Street after a virtual meeting of the “coalition of the willing”. The meeting was addressed by Starmer, Zelenskyy, the French president, Emmanuel Macron and the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte.
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Zelenskyy said on Saturday that Russia wanted to achieve a “stronger position” militarily before committing to any ceasefire in the war in Ukraine. “They want a stronger position before the ceasefire,” Zelenskyy said at a press conference in Kyiv. At the same event, Zelenskyy said the question of territory in Ukraine’s war with Russia was “complicated” and should be discussed in detail at a later date.
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The Ukrainian president also accused Putin of “lying to everyone”. In a post on X on Saturday, Zelenskyy said Putin was lying “about the situation on the ground, especially about what’s happening in the Kursk region, where our Ukrainian forces continue their operations” and “about how a ceasefire is supposedly too complicated”.
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Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey urged Starmer to seize frozen Russian assets to fund more support for Ukraine. Responding to Saturday morning’s meeting of the “coalition of the willing”, Davey said: “Putin could end this war today if he wanted peace, but it’s clear he’s only interested in destroying Ukraine’s sovereignty and turning it into a vassal state of Russia.” Asked about whether he had discussed seizing Russian assets with his counterparts, Starmer said it had been discussed, but added it was “a complicated question”.
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Mikhail Kasyanov, Vladimir Putin’s first prime minister and now an opponent of the Russian president, said Moscow was only interested in a conditional ceasefire. Kasyanov told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “He rejected this proposal for an unconditional ceasefire, he wants conditional, he wants a ceasefire on his terms.”
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A retired US general charged with helping sell the Trump administration’s Ukraine peace plan wrote a string of op-eds and reports for a rightwing thinktank in which he repeatedly questioned whether Ukraine had a legitimate part to play in peace negotiations. Keith Kellogg also blamed the war on the machinations of a US “military-industrial complex” and “[Joe] Biden’s national security incompetence” rather than Russia’s 2022 invasion, which has been condemned across the globe and resulted in a war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
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Zelenskyy said on Saturday that Kyiv’s forces were still fighting in Russia’s Kursk region and that they were not facing an encirclement. In a statement on social media, he added that the situation near the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk had stabilised but that Russian forces were accumulating across the border from Ukraine’s north-eastern Sumy region. Earlier on Saturday, the Russian defence ministry said that its troops had recaptured the villages of Rubanshchina and Zaoleshenka in its western Kursk region.
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Ukraine said on Saturday it had downed 130 Russian-launched drones across the country at night. Kyiv’s air force said the Iranian-made Shahed drones were downed over 14 regions and that Moscow had also attacked with two ballistic missiles.
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Kyiv also said that the number injured in a Russian strike a day earlier on Zelenskyy’s home town Kryvy Rig rose to 14. On Friday, officials said Russia attacked a residential area of the central Ukrainian city. “Fourteen people were wounded, among them two children,” the head of the Dnipropetrovsk region, Sergiy Lysak, said on Telegram.
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Russia deployed almost 200 firefighters to help put out a fire at an oil depot caused by a Ukraine drone strike in the southern Krasnodar region, authorities said. The governor of the Krasnodar region Veniamin Kondratyev said in the early hours of Saturday that a petrol reserve station in the Black Sea city of Tuapse was “attacked by the Kyiv regime”. The government of the Krasnodar region said 188 people were involved in putting out the fire.
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Akif Çağatay Kılıç, a foreign policy adviser to Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has said that one of the main obstacles to a peace settlement between Ukraine and Russia is a “loss of trust” between the two sides. He referred cryptically to a group of politicians, no longer in power, who he claimed scuppered the initial February 2022 talks in Istanbul, noting that the conditions under which Ukraine is able to negotiate now have changed.
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Ukraine’s largest private energy provider said on Saturday that overnight Russian airstrikes had damaged its energy facilities in the Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa regions. In a statement, DTEK said “damages are significant” and that some consumers in both regions were left without power.
Peter Walker, on where the phrase “coalition of the willing” comes from and what it means:
Ukraine would never recognise occupied territory as Russian and that he wasn’t aware of what exactly US and Russian officials discussed during recent talks in Moscow.
Keir Starmer has called for the “guns to fall silent in Ukraine” as he said military powers will meet next week as plans to secure a peace deal move to an “operational phase”.
The UK prime minister said Vladimir Putin’s “yes, but” approach to a proposed ceasefire was not good enough, and the Russian president would have to negotiate “sooner or later”.
He accused Putin of trying to delay peace, and said it must become a reality after more than three years of war.
Starmer was speaking at a press conference in Downing Street after a virtual meeting of the “coalition of the willing”, including the European Commission, European nations, Nato, Canada, Ukraine, Australia and New Zealand on Saturday morning.
The meeting was addressed by Starmer, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte.
Starmer told journalists:
Sooner or later Putin will have to come to the table. So this is the moment: let the guns fall silent, let the barbaric attacks on Ukraine once and for all stop, and agree to a ceasefire now.”
Trump administration’s Ukraine peace plan wrote a string of op-eds and reports for a rightwing thinktank in which he repeatedly questioned whether Ukraine had a legitimate part to play in peace negotiations.
Keith Kellogg also blamed the war on the machinations of a US “military-industrial complex” and “[Joe] Biden’s national security incompetence” rather than Russia’s 2022 invasion, which has been condemned across the globe and resulted in a war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
Kellogg has been seen as a hawk on Russia, but he also wrote that “the US should consider leveraging its military aid to Ukraine to make it contingent on Ukrainian officials agreeing to join peace talks with Russia”. Earlier this month, after a disastrous Washington DC meeting with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on 28 February, US aid to Ukraine was paused, as was intelligence sharing.
Here is a statement by Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy after today’s proposed way forward for a ceasefire, which he posted on X:
I addressed the meeting of European leaders stating that the path to peace must begin unconditionally. And if Russia doesn’t want this, then strong pressure must be applied until they do. Moscow understands one language.
Since Tuesday, a proposal for a ceasefire has been on the table – a silence from war in the air, at sea, and on the frontlines. This is an American proposal – a full, unconditional ceasefire for 30 days. In that time, without killings, it would truly be possible to negotiate all ll aspects of a real peace.
We talked about who would delay peace and slow everything down – and now we see it clearly. A ceasefire could have already happened, but Russia is doing everything to prevent it.
Putin is lying to everyone about the situation on the ground, especially about what’s happening in the Kursk region, where our Ukrainian forces continue their operations. Our troops have also stabilized the situation on the front in Donetsk region – specifically Pokrovsk.
Putin is also lying about how a ceasefire is supposedly too complicated. In reality, everything can be controlled, and we have discussed this with the Americans. The truth is, Putin has already dragged out the war for nearly a week after the talks in Jeddah. And he will keep dragging it out.
This is Russia’s war – more than three years of full-scale fighting and destruction. To stop this, active pressure is needed, not just talks. Pressure on Russia. Strong measures are needed to take even the first steps toward ending the war.
This includes sanctions against Russia that must not only be maintained but continuously strengthened. I ask you to take these steps and to work with your partners on this.
We must define a clear position on security guarantees. Security is key to making peace reliable and lasting. We need to continue working on the contingents that will form the foundation of Europe’s future armed forces. Peace will be more reliable with European contingents on the ground and the American side as a backstop. There must be clear commitments on how this will function.
The same applies to investments in defense production – both in Ukraine, where it is currently growing the fastest, and in European countries. Europe needs its own arsenals and the capability to produce the most advanced weapons. It shouldn’t take 3 to 5 years to produce ammunition when it’s about your defense and security. Please, do it as soon as possible.
I also ask you not to forget about strengthening air defense – both in Ukraine and, in the future, in your countries. We all need protection. I thank each of you who is helping us with this.
This is a very bad signal – taking Russia’s opinion into account regarding the contingent. The contingent must be stationed on Ukrainian soil. This is a security guarantee for Ukraine and a security guarantee for Europe. If Putin wants to bring some foreign contingent on to Russia’s territory, that’s his business. But it is not his business to decide anything about Ukraine’s and Europe’s security.”
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy says “path to peace must begin unconditionally”.
More details soon …
You can watch a clip from Keir Starmer’s press conference here:
UK prime minister Keir Starmer has said that “new commitments were put on the table” from international leaders today.
Starmer said:
The group that met this morning is a bigger group than we had two weeks ago, there is a stronger collective resolve and new commitments were put on the table this morning, both in relation to the coalition of the willing in terms of defending the deal, also in relation to the wider point, which is the collective defence and security of Europe.
So, more commitments on the table this morning and an agreement that we now move to the operational phase, which is why the talks on Thursday, the military talks, will become the next focal point.
There was a wider agreement this morning, which was that the ‘yes, but’ from Russia is not good enough, and we agreed our collective pressure will be put on Russia from all of us who are in the meeting this morning.”
UK prime minister Keir Starmer said on Saturday plans for Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire with Russia must involve the cooperation of the United States after being asked whether he was still seeking a security “backstop” from Washington.
“The position on the US hasn’t changed. I’ve been clear that it needs to be done in conjunction with the United States … We are talking to the US on a daily basis,” Starmer told a news conference, adding his national security adviser had returned from the US on Saturday.
Source: theguardian.com
