Ukraine war briefing: Zelenskyy says he met Roman Abramovich in Kyiv in backchannel to Putin (original) (raw)

• Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Roman Abramovich, the Russian magnate and former owner of Chelsea football club, had met him in Kyiv where he offered to take a message to the Kremlin on peace prospects. Zelenskyy’s comments to Sky News marked his first acknowledgment that the billionaire had travelled to Ukraine’s capital and was involved to some extent in negotiations. “He came to Kyiv. He said ‘I am messaging direct to you. And I want to take a message from you and give it to [Russian president Vladimir] Putin’. But he said it has to be silent without any kind of public messages,” Zelenskyy said.
• “You are fighting against us on our territory,” Zelenskyy said of his message to Abramovich. “We will not leave and we will not go out from our territory, no we will not give you victory,” he said, adding he had reiterated his request to meet Putin face-to-face. Zelenskyy said the meeting was “not a secret”, adding that the Russians wanted to know what Kyiv was “ready to do”. Abramovich has been sanctioned by the UK government after ministers accused him of having “clear connections” to Putin’s regime.
• Abramovich has not commented on the Kyiv meeting. However, he played a role in unsuccessful negotiations to end the fighting in the first weeks of the invasion, but has been less visible since. Putin has made it clear Russia is not prepared to stop fighting in Ukraine until Kyiv abandons the Donbas region, made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
• Zelenskyy met the leaders of the UK, France and Germany in London on Sunday, and discussed the “urgent need” to ramp up production of weapons to combat Russia’s powerful hypersonic Oreshnik ballistic missiles, write Alexandra Topping and Luke Harding. “The leaders underlined the urgent need to scale up the production of interceptors and co-develop anti-ballistic missile and deep strike capabilities,” a joint statement said after the meeting. No details, financial or otherwise, on how this would be done were provided. Zelenskyy will meet King Charles on Monday. Ukraine’s shortage of air defence systems, in part because of the depletion of US stocks during the Iran war, has left civilians especially vulnerable to ballistic missiles, even as Kyiv’s defences stop most of Moscow’s drones and its forces have made advances elsewhere on the battlefield.
• A Russian drone struck a storage facility for spent nuclear fuel near Ukraine’s Chornobyl power plant over the weekend. While the structure was empty of containers at the time, the targeting of the sensitive site appeared to be direct messaging from Moscow amid an intensifying battle of long-range aerial strikes in which high-profile locations on both sides have been hit, writes Peter Beaumont.
• Russia fired waves of drones and other munitions at Ukraine on Sunday, killing at least five people. A bombardment of a public transport stop in the Zaporizhzhia region killed at least two people, while a nearby drone strike killed a 56-year-old minibus driver, authorities said. A separate attack on Dnipro in central Ukraine killed a 59-year-old man, the region’s governor, Oleksandr Ganzha, posted on Telegram.
• Russia’s defence ministry said on Sunday its air defences had downed 500 Ukrainian drones in the past 24 hours, Interfax news agency reported.
• Moldova’s President, Maia Sandu, said the war in neighbouring Ukraine showed that her country badly needed high-technology interceptor drones and new legislation was required to facilitate their manufacture. Moldova, which is seeking EU membership by 2030, has dealt with numerous incidents of Russian drones flying over its territory or debris landing in areas near the border. Sandu, a fierce critic of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, expressed particular concern over a drone last month that struck a residence in Galati, a Romanian city near the border with Moldova and Ukraine, injuring two people.