Volodymyr Zelensky vows Ukraine will not cede territory in effort to end Russian invasion
Mr Zelensky's comments were his first response to news of that meeting as well as reports that talks between Washington and Moscow centre around a deal that would lock in Russia's occupation of territory seized during its military invasion, according to sources.
That includes a demand by Putin that Ukraine cede Crimea, which Kremlin forces illegally annexed in 2014, as well as its entire eastern Donbas area.
It would require Mr Zelensky to withdraw troops from parts of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions still held by Kyiv.
National security advisers from Europe, Ukraine and the US planned to discuss 'progress toward securing a just and lasting peace', a Downing Street spokesperson said.
The talks followed an earlier call between Mr Zelensky and UK prime minister Keir Starmer, and a flurry of diplomacy involving the Ukraine president and other leaders.
UK foreign secretary David Lammy and US vice-president JD Vance co-hosted the meeting. The talks were attended by US officials via video link, the Wall Street Journal reported, adding that European powers offered a counterproposal for talks with Russia that would in the first instance demand a ceasefire.
Any decisions taken without Ukraine 'are at the same time decisions against peace. They will not achieve anything,' Mr Zelensky said. 'The answer to the Ukrainian territorial question is already in the constitution of Ukraine. No one will deviate from this.'
The UK and Ukraine 'share the same view on the need for a truly lasting peace for Ukraine and on the danger of Russia's plan to reduce everything to discussing the impossible', Mr Zelensky said in a separate post after his call with Mr Starmer.
Mr Zelensky also had calls with French president Emmanuel Macron and Finnish president Alexander Stubb, as well as the prime ministers of Spain, Denmark and Estonia, according to his posts.
Separately, Mr Macron had phone discussions with Starmer and German chancellor Friedrich Merz, the French president said on X.
'Ukraine's future cannot be decided without the Ukrainians,' Mr Macron said. 'Europeans will also necessarily be part of the solution, as their own security is at stake.'
In turn, Putin spoke yesterday with Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the latest in the series of international calls by the Russian leader since he met with US special envoy Steve Witkoff earlier this week.
Amid preparations for talks, Russia and Ukraine continued to trade air attacks. Russia shot down a total of 162 Ukrainian drones over its territory from late Friday through noon yesterday, according to the nation's defence ministry.
Three unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) targeting Moscow were downed in the first half of the day, the capital's mayor said in Telegram posts.
Ukrainian drones hit a UAV storage facility in Kzyl Yul in the Russian republic of Tatarstan, 1,300km from Ukrainian territory, the Security Service of Ukraine said on Telegram.
Russian defence minister Andrey Belousov inspected facilities of the nation's Baltic fleet in the Kaliningrad region, Russia's exclave neighbouring Lithuania and Poland. Belousov said the means of repelling drone attacks is among the fleet's priorities.
Ukraine's air forces on Telegram reported 47 drones and two Iskander missiles fired by Russia overnight. According to preliminary data, air defences had repelled one Iskander missile and 16 UAVs.
Before Trump announced the summit, his efforts to pressure Russia into stopping the fighting had delivered no progress. The Kremlin's bigger army is slowly advancing deeper into Ukraine at great cost in troops and armour while it relentlessly bombards Ukrainian cities.
Yesterday, two people died and 16 were wounded when a Russian drone hit a minibus in the suburbs of the Ukrainian city of Kherson. Two others died after a Russian drone struck their car in the Zaporizhzhia region.
Ukraine's air force said it intercepted 16 of the 47 Russian drones launched overnight, while 31 drones hit targets across 15 different locations. It also said it shot down one of the two missiles Russia deployed.
Russia's defence ministry said its air defences shot down 97 Ukrainian drones overnight and 21 more yesterday morning.
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Zelenskyy said Russia was desperately trying to show it was winning the war and that the Kremlin wanted 'to create a certain narrative, especially in the American media, that Russia is moving forward and Ukraine is losing' by mounting sabotage attacks in the Donbas region. He acknowledged that 'groups of Russians advanced about 10 kilometres in several places' although he said: 'They have no equipment, only weapons in their hands,' and said that some had already been killed or captured. But the breach is ill-timed from Ukraine's point of view. In Alaska, Putin is likely to tell Trump that such successes show that Russia is gradually winning the three-year war in the east, and so US future support for Kyiv will be wasted. War maps showed two lines of advance east of the town of Dobropillya, and gains of about six miles since Friday. Experts said the next few days would be critical to see if Ukraine could contain the break in the front. Ukraine's military said Russia had concentrated about 110,000 troops in the sector and that the invaders were 'brazenly attempting to infiltrate our defensive lines with sabotage and small infantry groups, regardless of their losses'. A Ukrainian serviceman of 57th motorised brigade controls an FPV drone at the frontline in Kharkiv region. File picture: Andrii Marienko/AP The military command said in a social media post that reserves had been deployed at the order of Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine's chief military commander, in an effort to restore the frontlines. The Institute for the Study of War said Russian 'sabotage and reconnaissance groups' had infiltrated Ukrainian-held territory near Dobropillya, a key supply point in the west of the Donetsk region. 'It is premature to call the Russian advances in the Dobropillya area an operational-level breakthrough,' the ISW said on Monday night. It said the invaders would now try to turn 'tactical advances' into something more significant. Russia is taking heavy casualties of about 1,000 a day, with 500 killed and 500 wounded on Monday, Zelenskyy said, as it relies heavily on infantry assaults to break Kyiv's defensive lines. Zelenskyy said Ukraine's casualties on the same day were much smaller — a total of 340 — '18 killed and 243 wounded, with 79 missing in action'. But in the past when Moscow's forces have broken through, Ukraine has frequently proved unable to push them back. A former senior Ukrainian army officer, Bohdan Krotevych, said the piercing of Ukraine's lines had come about because 'instead of reinforcing defensive units with infantry', senior commanders in Kyiv had prioritised deploying newly mobilised soldiers into assault forces, leaving units already on the frontline weakened. 'To stabilise the front, we must reinforce brigades on the line of contact with infantry,' Krotevych said, and he called for Ukraine to urgently strengthen its reserve forces and adopt a defensive strategy rather than try to counter high-risk Russian infantry assaults with its own. Dobropillya is a key supply point for the beleaguered towns of Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad to the south and the principal cities of Ukrainian-held Donbas to the east from the centre of the country. Zelenskyy said Russia was preparing a fresh offensive in the autumn involving nearly 30,000 troops moved from Sumy, in the north-east of Ukraine, 'in three directions' on the frontline — towards Zaporizhzhia in the south and Pokrovsk and the nearby Novopavlika in the south-east. — The Guardian
