MOSCOW: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Moscow of shirking a meeting between him and Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, despite US-led attempts to arrange a summit to end the war.
US President Donald Trump is trying to end Russia’s three-and-a-half year invasion of Ukraine by bringing both Zelensky and Putin to the negotiating table.
But despite high-profile talks with Putin in Alaska last week and separate meetings with Zelensky and European leaders in Washington on Monday, there has been little tangible progress towards a peace deal.
Zelensky said Russia was “trying to wriggle out of holding a meeting”.
“Frankly speaking, the signals coming from Russia are simply outrageous… They don’t want to end this war,” the Ukrainian leader said during an evening address.
“They continue their massive attacks on Ukraine and their ferocious assaults along the front line,” he said.
Zelensky has signalled willingness to meet with Putin, but only after his allies agree on security guarantees for Ukraine to deter future Russian attacks once the fighting stops.
He has also said any meeting should take place in a “neutral” European country — ruling out a summit in Moscow — and rejected the idea of China helping to guarantee Ukrainian security.
Russia, meanwhile, said that Ukraine did not appear to be interested in “long-term” peace, accusing Kyiv of seeking guarantees incompatible with Moscow’s demands.
Trump has set a two-week time frame for assessing the chances of a peace agreement, telling the right-wing media outlet Newsmax that Washington would “have to maybe take a different tack” if the talks fell through.
Zelensky also warned that both Moscow and Kyiv were preparing for further fighting. Russia was building up troops on the southern front line, and Ukraine was test-launching a new long-range cruise missile, he said.
His comments came after Russia launched hundreds of drones and missiles against Ukraine overnight — the biggest barrage since mid-July — killing one person in the western city of Lviv and wounding many others.
Russian missiles also targeted an American-owned factory complex in the town of Mukachevo in western Ukraine, wounding 23 people, the head of the regional military administration said.
The president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine, Andy Hunder, said that Moscow aimed to “destroy and humiliate” US businesses in the country. Zelensky called the attack “a deliberate strike specifically on American-owned property”.
A later shelling of the city of Kherson killed one person and wounded more than a dozen, a local official said. And in the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine’s Donetsk region, two people were killed and at least 21 wounded after Ukrainian shelling, the Russian-installed regional chief, Denis Pushilin, said.
