Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is due to meet European leaders in the United Kingdom for talks on military aid to stave off future Russian aggression if a ceasefire stops the war now in its fourth year.
Zelenskyy and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer are expected to be joined at the Foreign Office in London on Friday by NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof.
About 20 other leaders are to join via videolink at the meeting of the “Coalition of the Willing”, a group of countries that have pledged strengthened support for Ukraine.
The meeting also intends to work out ways of helping protect Ukraine’s power grid from Russia’s almost daily drone and missile attacks as another punishing winter approaches, enhancing Ukrainian air defences and supplying Kyiv with longer-range missiles that can strike deep inside Russia.
Russia has intensified its heavy bombardments of Ukraine, targeting civilian areas as well as energy infrastructure before winter. Rolling power cuts have been introduced across the country in recent days, including in Kyiv, as the country rations electricity.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has so far resisted efforts to negotiate a peace settlement with Zelenskyy and has argued that Russia’s all-out invasion of its smaller neighbour is legitimate.
Friday’s talks aim to step up pressure on Putin, adding momentum to measures in recent days that include a new round of sanctions from an increasingly frustrated United States and Europe that take aim at Russia’s vital oil and gas export earnings.
Starmer criticised Putin’s unbudging stance before Friday’s meeting. “Time and again we offer Putin the chance to end his needless invasion, to stop the killing and recall his troops, but he repeatedly rejects those proposals and any chance of peace,” the UK prime minister said.
War shows no sign of subsiding
Any peace agreement appears at the moment to be a distant possibility.
A Ukrainian drone crashed into an apartment block in a Moscow suburb on Friday, wounding a boy and four other people, officials said.
While such attacks are common inside major Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, this was a rare strike close to the Russian capital. It hit the 14th floor of a residential building in Krasnogorsk on the western edge of Moscow, the governor of the Moscow region, Andrey Vorobyov, said on Telegram.
The attack came after both countries traded another night of aerial strikes.
Russia’s Ministry of Defence said on Friday that its forces downed 111 Ukrainian drones over several regions overnight and the debris caused damage to homes and infrastructure. Ukraine’s air force said Moscow launched 128 drones during the night.
Meanwhile, the Russian Defence Ministry said its forces have taken control of three more villages in eastern Ukraine. Russian news agencies cited the ministry as saying Russian troops took Bolohivka in the Kharkiv region, Promin in the Donetsk region and Zlagoda in the Dnipropetrovsk region.
Earlier, the ministry also said its forces had captured the settlement of Dronivka in Donetsk.
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