Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that Russia wants Ukraine to withdraw from the entire eastern region of Donetsk as part of a ceasefire deal, in advance of a meeting between Russian leader Vladimir Putin and United States President Donald Trump in Alaska on Friday, where issues of giving up land to end the war will be focal.
Zelenskyy revealed the demand on Tuesday, before reiterating that Kyiv, which still controls 9,000 square kilometres (3,500 square miles) of Ukraine’s Donetsk, where the fiercest fighting of the war is currently taking place, would not agree to this stipulation, as it was unconstitutional and would incentivise future Russian aggression.
Speaking about the Alaska summit, the Ukrainian president said that he viewed Putin’s invitation to the US as a “personal victory” for the Russian leader.
On the battlefield, the Ukrainian military sent reserves to stem Russian advances near two key cities in Donetsk, as Moscow attempted to gain more Ukrainian territory before the talks on Friday.
On Tuesday, the Ukrainian General Staff said its forces were involved in “difficult” fighting close to Pokrovsk and Dobropillia, with extra soldiers needed to block attacks by small groups of Russian troops.
The development suggests intensifying struggles in the Donetsk area, where Moscow-backed separatists have mainly held sway since the conflict there erupted there in 2014, instigated by the Kremlin and deepened by Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Some of the advancing clusters of Russian soldiers had been destroyed, while others were still being engaged in combat, the Ukrainian army added.
Russia’s advance is one of the most dramatic in the past year, with its soldiers infiltrating 17km (10 miles) past Ukrainian lines over the last three days, according to Pasi Paroinen, a military analyst with the Finland-based Black Bird Group.
Moscow, which has further isolated the destroyed town of Kostiantynivka, one of the last remaining urban areas Ukraine still holds in Donetsk, hopes to encircle the nearby city of Pokrovsk.
“A lot will depend on availability, quantity and quality of Ukrainian reserves,” Paroinen wrote on X Monday.
Ukraine’s DeepState blog, which has close connections to the Ukrainian military, described the situation as “quite chaotic”, as Russian troops are “infiltrating deeper, trying to quickly consolidate and accumulate forces for further advancement”.
The Institute for the Study of War, a US-based research group, said that Moscow’s advances in the Dobropillia area did not yet amount to “an operational-level breakthrough”.
The Russian advance in eastern Ukraine comes as Europe hopes to rally Trump to Ukraine’s cause at an emergency virtual summit on Wednesday.
Organised by the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, the meetings are due to be attended by European Union leaders, Trump and Zelenskyy.
In the run-up to the talks, all EU leaders except Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is an ally of Putin, said on Tuesday that they welcomed the US president’s efforts “towards ending Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine”, but emphasised that “the path to peace in Ukraine cannot be decided without Ukraine” and that “international borders must not be changed by force”.
Trump had earlier disappointed his European allies by saying that Ukraine would have to cede land to Russia if peace is to be achieved.
Reporting from Kyiv, Al Jazeera’s correspondent Charles Stratford said that in Europe, “there are growing concerns the closer we get to Friday”.
Europeans are “anxious” because the Trump-Putin summit potentially has “serious implications for European security”, he noted.
Meanwhile, Zelenskyy has warned that Russia is “not preparing to end the war”, despite the scheduled Alaska meeting.
“On the contrary, they are making movements that indicate preparations for new offensive operations,” he wrote on X.
In other developments, Ukraine’s SBU intelligence agency said it had successfully targeted a building in Russia’s Tatarstan region, 1,300km (800 miles) from Ukraine, which contained long-range Shahed drones.
Videos shot by local residents confirmed that the facility was hit, the SBU added, noting that it was the second such strike from a great distance in four days.
Meanwhile, Putin and his North Korean counterpart and ally, Kim Jong Un, have had a phone call about the upcoming Alaska summit, the Kremlin said on Tuesday.
Relations between Russia and North Korea have deepened dramatically during the last two years of the war in Ukraine, which started with Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbour in February 2022, with Pyongyang deploying more than 10,000 troops and arms to back Moscow.
