According to the Kremlin, Russia opposes European proposals for security guarantees for Ukraine and won’t permit NATO troops to station on the territory of its neighbor.
Russian spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow on Wednesday that while Moscow applauded recent efforts by US President Donald Trump to put an end to the conflict in Ukraine, it would be equivalent to a NATO presence on its neighbor’s territory.
According to Peskov, “at the very beginning, it was the development of NATO military infrastructure and the infiltration of this military infrastructure into Ukraine that could probably be attributed as the root causes of the conflict situation that arose.”
We therefore have a negative opinion of these discussions.
Security guarantees against unforeseen Russian aggression are a crucial factor in efforts to put an end to Russia’s conflict in Ukraine, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy calling for them to be included in a potential peace agreement to be as close as possible to NATO’s Article 5, which states that an attack on one member state would be an attack on all.
Trump has stated that any future security guarantees that the US will provide for Ukraine should be made up of European nations, with the majority of the burden being carried out by them. Russia insists that NATO forces must not station troops in Ukraine, making it one of the nations’ security guarantors.
Trump’s efforts to end the war were described as “very important,” according to Peskov, who claimed the US-Russia presidential summit in Alaska this month was “very substantive, constructive, and useful,” adding that Moscow hoped the efforts would continue.
Security guarantees were “one of the most important topics” in the discussions, he said, but Russia did not think it was helpful to discuss them in public.
Zelenskyy demands immediate response.
Meanwhile, Zelenskyy claimed in a post on X on Wednesday that his teams were “accelerating the process of defining the details” of upcoming multilateral security guarantees for Ukraine and that the time was right to convene leaders’ discussions on the main issues and deadlines.
With the assistance of allies, including Europeans, Americans, and our other partners in the Coalition of the Willing, our teams are working hard to create strong, multilateral security guarantees for Ukraine, he said.
We are putting together the components of future security, he said, “military commanders, defense ministers, and security advisors” at various levels. “The leaders’ discussions should be held in a way that best fits their needs and timelines,” he said.
He claimed that Russia is “currently eliciting negative feedback regarding meetings and subsequent developments.”
“The Russians will only act in response to all of this with actual pressure,” they say. There is need for pressure. We rely on it, too.
In response to concerns that Russia was stalling, the US president suggested he would consider imposing additional sanctions on Moscow. The US and Ukraine have been lobbying for a face-to-face meeting to advance peace negotiations.
Energy infrastructure is being attacked
The Kremlin claimed it had captured a village in eastern Donetsk, and Ukraine was the subject of another wave of drone attacks that targeted critical infrastructure overnight.
100, 000 homes in three regions of Poltava, Sumy, and Chernihiv were left without electricity as a result of a wave of attacks by nearly 100 drones, including strikes on energy facilities, Zelenskyy claimed in a post on X.
According to a statement from the Ukrainian government’s statement on Telegram, the attacks targeted infrastructure in six regions, severely damaging the gas transport infrastructure in Poltava and damaging equipment at a crucial Sumy substation, according to the Reuters news agency.
The ministry stated that the Russian attacks are a continuation of the Russian Federation’s deliberate strategy to systematically destroy Ukraine’s civil infrastructure ahead of the heating season.
Governor Volodymyr Kohut stated in a statement on Telegram that the power has since been restored in Poltava.
In recent weeks, Russia has increased its attacks on Ukrainian gas production and import infrastructure, calling them legitimate targets because they support the country’s war effort.
74 drones launched by the Ukrainian air force were downed overnight, according to Reuters, with 21 of them striking nine locations throughout the nation, according to the report.
Zelenskyy claimed that the overnight wave of attacks, which were “focused specifically on civilian infrastructure,” had also injured a school in the Kharkiv region and a residential apartment complex in Kherson.
He claimed that the ongoing attacks underscored the need to exert more pressure on Russia to end its conflict.
To put an end to the attacks and to provide real security guarantees, “new steps are required.”
At least two people have died in recent Russian attacks, according to the AFP news agency. According to Governor Oleksandr Prokudin, two farm workers were killed on Wednesday morning by Russian artillery fire in Novovorontsovka, a village in the Kherson region.
Source: Aljazeera
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