outside parliament on Tuesday. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA
The Russian leadership continued to obfuscate on Wednesday, after European leaders and Donald Trump said Vladimir Putin had agreed to a one-on-one meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy to kickstart peace talks. Sergei Lavrov said Moscow did not reject any format for Ukraine peace talks but the Russian foreign minister appeared to apply the brakes, saying any leaders’ meeting “must be prepared with utmost thoroughness”. On Tuesday, a Kremlin aide said only that Putin was open to the “idea” of “raising the level of representatives of the Ukrainian and Russian sides” at a future meeting.
The White House also announced that Viktor Orbán, the pro-Putin Hungarian prime minister, and Trump had discussed the possibility of talks being held in Budapest. As with the Kremlin, there was no apparent confirmation of this conversation from the Hungarian side. A war crimes warrant could oblige Hungarian authorities to arrest a visiting Putin, but Hungary is withdrawing from the international criminal court. Orbán explicitly committing to play host could place further unwanted pressure on the Russian ruler from one of his few allies to accept the meeting as an inevitability.
Austria and Switzerland also said they would be ready to host the meeting. Switzerland said that during Putin’s visit it could set aside its international criminal court obligations. “This has to do with our diplomatic role, with international Geneva as [the European] headquarters of the United Nations,” said Ignazio Cassis, the Swiss foreign minister. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said Geneva was a potential location for the talks. The Austrian chancellor, Christian Stocker, said his country supported any initiative leading to a just and lasting peace protecting Ukrainian and European security.
Donald Trump has ruled out sending US troops to Ukraine to enforce a potential peace deal, tempering a promise to provide Kyiv with security guarantees in conjunction with European allies, write Andrew Roth and Pjotr Sauer. In a phone interview with Fox News, Trump did however say that Washington may be willing to provide air support to Ukraine in order to backstop a deal, in what would still be a remarkable shift in his administration’s policy on the conflict.
Putin opposes Ukraine joining Nato – Trump told Fox that “there’ll be some form of security. It can’t be Nato. They’re willing to put people on the ground. We’re willing to help them with things, especially, probably, if you could talk about by air.” Trump conceded that Putin might not want to make a deal after all, saying: “We’re going to find out about President Putin in the next couple of weeks.”
Nato military leaders are expected to meet on Wednesday to discuss Ukraine and the way forward, a US official and Nato official have told the Reuters news agency. The US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Gen Dan Caine, chair of the US joint chiefs of staff, was expected to teleconference in, but plans could still change. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Another Nato official said the alliance’s top military commander, Alexus Grynkewich, would brief the leaders on the results of the Alaska meeting between Trump and Putin last week.
Following Monday’s meeting in Washington, Russia launched its biggest air assault in more than a month on Ukraine, with 270 drones and 10 missiles fired, the Ukrainian air force said. The energy ministry said the strikes caused big fires at energy facilities in the central Poltava region, home to Ukraine’s only oil refinery. The governor of Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, Serhiy Lysak, said Russian shelling killed a resident of Nikopol, a frequent target of Moscow’s attacks.
A Ukrainian drone attack late on Tuesday knocked out power to Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, said the Moscow-installed governor, Yevgeny Balitsky. Kyiv maintains control of the region’s main administrative centre and its attacks have periodically knocked out electricity in Russian-held areas. The illegally occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station was unaffected, the plant’s director told Russia’s RIA news agency. The plant produces no electricity but needs power for cooling and monitoring systems to maintain safety.
Russia and Ukraine exchanged more bodies of their war dead, the Moscow-run Tass news agency reported on Tuesday, citing a source. Moscow handed over the bodies of 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers and had received 19 bodies of its own fallen soldiers in return, it was reported. Ukraine appeared to confirm the exchange.
