Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has secured the backing of the leaders of the United Kingdom, France and Germany for his proposal to hold direct ceasefire talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to a joint statement issued after defence discussions in London.
Mr Zelensky met British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz at 10 Downing Street on Sunday, as Russia’s war against Ukraine entered its fifth year.
In a joint statement, the leaders said they supported “the proposal for a direct dialogue between Ukraine and Russia—with active US and European participation—to bring about a ceasefire and support further negotiations”.
“The current line of contact should be the starting point for negotiations,” the statement said, adding that “international borders must not be changed by force”.
Mr Zelensky publicly proposed a face-to-face meeting with Mr Putin in an open letter on Thursday. The Russian president rejected the suggestion, saying he saw “no point” in meeting his Ukrainian counterpart until a possible peace agreement had been reached.
Speaking to Sky News on Sunday evening, Mr Zelensky said he had also met Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich in Kyiv and used the encounter to send a message to the Kremlin leader.
“You are fighting against us on our territory,” he said. “We will not leave and we will not go out from our territory, no we will not give you victory.”
He added that he had reiterated his request for a direct meeting with Mr Putin.
Ukraine has continued to press its Western allies for additional ammunition to strengthen its air defences against daily Russian attacks, while also seeking greater international pressure on Moscow to end the war.
Earlier on Sunday, Mr Zelensky said on X that he would meet King Charles III on Monday.
Despite renewed diplomatic efforts in London, fighting continued across the region.
On Monday, a Ukrainian drone strike on a passenger train in Crimea killed one driver and injured another, according to Sergey Aksyonov, the Moscow-installed head of the region.
The attack followed a wave of Russian drone and missile strikes on Ukraine. Ukrainian officials said one strike damaged a nuclear fuel storage facility near the site of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
Ukraine’s state nuclear operator, Energoatom, said radiation levels remained within normal limits, although the facility’s fuel reception building had been “partially destroyed”.
Mr Zelensky said an Iranian-designed Shahed drone had “hit one of the buildings of the Centralized Spent Fuel Storage Facility” within the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
“As of now, there are no readings exceeding normal background radiation levels. But there is certainly an increase in Russia’s brazenness, which long ago went off the charts,” he said.
The International Atomic Energy Agency described the incident as “deeply concerning” and said it was sending a team to assess the damage.
The storage facility is located in a remote forested area about 12 kilometres from the Chernobyl nuclear plant and is designed to hold spent fuel from Ukraine’s three operational nuclear power stations.
Russia and Ukraine have significantly increased drone attacks against each other in recent months, while US-led efforts to broker a peace settlement have stalled and been overshadowed by conflict in the Middle East.
Both sides also accused each other of attacks on civilians on Sunday.
In Ukraine’s southern Zaporizhzhia region, Russian shelling of a public transport stop killed at least two people, while a nearby drone strike killed a 56-year-old minibus driver, according to local authorities.
In the central Dnipropetrovsk region, separate Russian attacks killed two men, Governor Oleksandr Ganzha said.
Meanwhile, in Russia’s Belgorod border region, local officials said a Ukrainian drone strike on a car killed a woman and injured her husband.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and millions displaced since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Russia currently controls around one-fifth of Ukrainian territory, including the Crimean Peninsula, annexed in 2014, most of the eastern Donetsk and Lugansk regions, collectively known as the Donbas, and large areas of the southern Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.
