Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has landed in New York where he will attend the United Nations general assembly and try to drum up support for a US-led peace effort to end the war in Ukraine. “We are doing everything to stop the war,” he wrote on X on Tuesday, adding that he had two dozen meetings scheduled. The Ukrainian leader is expected to meet US president Donald Trump and other world leaders on the sidelines of the UN meeting, and deliver an address on Wednesday.
Zelenskyy said he would also attend the first leaders’ summit of the Coalition for the Return of Ukrainian Children, which would for the first time be held on a global stage. The meeting, he said, underlined “the global nature of the changes brought about by this war, the war that Russia began in Crimea”. As many as 35,000 Ukrainian children are still missing and thought to be held in Russia or Russian-occupied territories, according to an American team of experts.
Washington’s new envoy to the United Nations, Michael Waltz, vowed on Monday to “defend every inch of Nato territory” as he addressed an emergency meeting over an incursion by Russian fighter jets into Estonia’s airspace. Nato scrambled jets after three Russian MiG-31 fighters on Friday breached Estonian airspace, triggering complaints of a dangerous new provocation and denial from Moscow.
The incursion followed complaints by fellow Nato member Poland which said earlier this month that Russian drones had repeatedly violated its airspace during an attack on Ukraine, in what Warsaw called an “act of aggression.” Trump on Sunday joined the condemnation of the latest airspace violation, vowing to defend Poland and the Baltic states in case of escalation from Russia.
Ukraine should be fully integrated into plans for a “drone wall” to protect Nato’s borders because it has the experience and knowhow to do it, Lithuania’s foreign minister said on Monday. The EU is looking at how to create a “drone wall” along the EU’s eastern border – a project infused with urgency by a Russian drone incursion into Poland. “We have big holes in our EU defence. We lack the right equipment that would allow us to detect drones, to follow them, to track them, and then to destroy them,” Kestutis Budrys told Reuters at the UN meeting.
Russia’s defence ministry said on Monday its forces had taken control of the settlement of Kalynivske, just inside Ukraine’s southeastern Dnipropetrovsk region. The Ukrainian military has denied the claims, saying that Moscow’s troops had made less progress in the region than they had reported. Ukraine’s military says it is engaged in counterattack operations in part of Donetsk region, the focal point of the conflict.
Russian president Vladimir Putin on Monday declared his readiness to adhere to nuclear arms limits for one more year under the last remaining nuclear pact with the United States that expires in February, and he urged Washington to follow suit. Putin said allowing the New START agreement signed in 2010 to expire would be destabilising and could fuel proliferation of nuclear weapons.
The International Monetary Fund has persuaded Ukraine’s government to accept the fund’s $65bn estimate of foreign funding needed through 2027 compared to Ukraine’s earlier $38bn estimate, Bloomberg News reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. Kyiv is spending about 60% of its budget on its war effort against Russia and relies heavily on financial support from its western allies to cover the cost of pensions, public sector wages and humanitarian spending.
