Vladimir Putin has rejected an offer from Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy to hold a face-to-face meeting, insisting instead that Russia will achieve its war goals in Ukraine, including seizing all of the eastern Donbas region. Speaking at a St Petersburg economic forum, the Russian president described an open letter from his Ukrainian counterpart containing the offer as rude. He refused to use Zelenskyy’s name, referring to him only as its author, and said he saw “no point” in meeting Zelenskyy.
Zelenskyy’s letter, which was published on Thursday, proposed a meeting in a third country such as Switzerland or Turkey. It said diplomacy should start from the current frontline and that Ukraine was ready for a full ceasefire while negotiations took place.
Putin has shrugged off embarrassing drone strikes by Ukraine on his home city of St Petersburg during this week’s economic forum, and said his territorial demands on Ukraine were unchanged. He said Russia controlled all of the Luhansk region – a claim Kyiv denies – and more than 85% of Donetsk region. He repeated his demand that Ukraine also give up all of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.
Zelenskyy said Putin’s rejection showed the Kremlin had no wish to end the conflict. “Unfortunately, the Russian side is once again choosing war. Everyone heard the response. A weak response,” he said in his nightly video address. “I think this response will have disappointed many in the world.”
Russian attacks killed five people in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region in three separate incidents on Friday, the regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin, said on Telegram. Kherson is one of four regions that were annexed by Russia six months after Russia’s 2022 invasion.
Meanwhile, a sea drone self-destructed near an oil terminal in Romania’s Black Sea port of Constanta on Friday, without causing casualties, as Ukraine said Russia jammed the vessel causing it to drift off course. The explosion was the second major incident in a populated area in Romania on Nato’s eastern flank within a week, as the spillover threat from the war in Ukraine increases.
A week after Moscow accused Ukraine of a drone attack on the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant – Europe’s largest – Russia’s nuclear energy corporation Rosatom has said a Ukrainian drone deliberately struck engineers on Friday who were demining an area around the station, injuring at least three people. Rosatom said the incident occurred at the start of a ceasefire around the plant, brokered by the UN’s nuclear watchdog.
The Zaporizhzhia plant, Europe’s largest with six reactors, was seized by Russian troops in the early weeks of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Each side has since accused the other of undertaking military actions to compromise nuclear safety.
Putin has held a one-on-one meeting with former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, which was “good and friendly,” Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov was quoted as saying on Friday by Russian news agencies. Schroeder, who was German Chancellor from 1998 to 2005, has subsequently worked for Russian state companies and cultivated a close relationship with Putin. Putin last month suggested that he would be willing to negotiate new security arrangements for Europe, with Schroeder as his preferred partner. But European Union foreign ministers at a meeting in Brussels rejected any role for Schroeder.