said at the time that they had drawn up an “updated and refined peace framework”<\/a> – but provided no further details.<\/p>\nTop negotiators from Europe – who had voiced concern over the original US plan – were also in the Swiss city last week, meeting separately with the Ukrainian and the US teams.<\/p>\n
In a separate development on Thursday, Germany’s Der Spiegel news website said it had obtained a confidential transcript of a conference call in which European leaders expressed concern over the US negotiations.<\/p>\n
“There is a possibility that the US will betray Ukraine on the issue of territory without clarity on security guarantees,” French President Emmanuel Macron reportedly said, according to an English transcript of Monday’s conference call.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz was quoted as warning that Zelensky had to be “extremely careful in the coming days”.<\/p>\n
“They are playing games, both with you and with us,” Merz reportedly said.<\/p>\n
Finnish President Alexander Stubb was also quoted as saying: “We mustn’t leave Ukraine and Volodymyr alone with these guys.”<\/p>\n
The BBC has not seen the reported transcript. <\/p>\n
In response to a Der Spiegel inquiry, France’s \u00c9lys\u00e9e Palace stated that “the president did not express himself in those terms”. The presidential office declined to provide details on how Macron expressed himself, citing confidentiality.<\/p>\n
Stubb declined to comment to Der Spiegel, and Merz has not commented on the issue.<\/p>\n
The BBC has contacted the White House for comment.<\/p>\n
Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and Moscow currently controls about 20% of Ukrainian territory.<\/p>\n
In recent weeks, Russian troops have been slowly advancing in south-east Ukraine, despite reported heavy combat casualties.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Vladimir Putin has warned again that Ukrainian troops must withdraw from Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region or Russia…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":325585,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-325584","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=325584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325584\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/325585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=325584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=325584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=325584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}